Courant is coordinating with ITS to schedule a power outage in the Warren Weaver Hall data center for electrical work related to the installation of new UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) systems, which will provide emergency backup power to the entire data center. The outage will be substantial, lasting approximately 16-24 hours, during which time Courant's primary system and network services in Warren Weaver Hall will be unavailable. At this time, the proposed target date for the outage is Saturday, June 22nd, 2013. We will know more about specific timing as planning progresses.

This work must be scheduled for this summer, as the current UPS infrastructure for the data center is both obsolete and inadequate. Because this data center serves as the hub of Courant's computing and network services, the impact of this outage will be significant, but so will the benefits, though the objective is that users will never be aware of them.

During the outage:

While Courant's primary file and mail servers will be unavailable, and network connectivity throughout Warren Weaver Hall, both wired and wireless, will be out of commission, systems and network connectivity at 715/719 Broadway will remain available.

To minimize the impact of the outage on our community, fail-over equipment housed in 715 Broadway will be used to keep CIMS, Math, CS and research web services on-line, as well as to provide "read only" access to files and mail, enabling users to continue working using alternative storage space, either on their personal computers or temporary disk space Courant will provide.

After the Outage:

Following this initial phase of the work, a second outage of CIMS equipment will need to be planned for a later date to connect our circuit panels to the new UPS systems. This subsequent outage will be considerably shorter in duration than the first.

At present, we have limited backup power capacity protecting only our critical servers and disk systems. Once the transition is completed, however, this protection will extend to secondary services and computing resources, protecting long-running jobs and generally enabling us to withstand planned and unplanned power disruptions lasting as long as 15-30 minutes. The most practical advantage of this is that it will ensure smooth transitions between Con Edison and NYU Co-gen power in cases when such transfers are necessary.

Update: Moved to WWH 201

An Intel engineer with the Intel Cluster Tools Suite will be giving an on-site seminar in regards to their clustering software suite.  CIMS as well as the NYU community (HPC, etc) are invited.  CIMS users have access to these tools by running 'module load intel64', and the tools are located in '/opt/intel'.

• Location: WWH 201
• Date: Tuesday, April 30th from 1:15pm - 3:15pm
• Topics:
• - MPI Performance Options
• - Analysis tools
• - MKL (may be rescheduled for separate seminar if sufficient interest)

Space is limited, so please RSVP to guarantee yourself a seat (login with your NYU NetID).

More documentation in regards to the Intel Cluster Suite are available from the Intel Website.

Due to increasing usage of the Windows Virtual Lab (Windows on Linux) service, several users have run into the situation where a VM wasn't available for use.  We've added new nodes to the virtual pool of available machines to address the issue.  Thank you for being patient with our continued expansion of this service.

If you continue to run into any problems, please let us know at helpdesk@cims.nyu.edu.

COMSOL is now available from all the CIMS Linux machines (compute nodes and desktops).

The COMSOL Multiphysics simulation environment facilitates all the steps in the modeling process – defining your geometry, meshing, specifying your physics, solving, and then visualizing your results.

Simply run 'comsol' from a command line interface.

There was an issue with incoming email from outside that may have resulted in some mail being returned to the sender. The issue has been resolved, but if you were expecting something you have not received, you may want to have the sender resend it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

There was an issue with incoming email from
outside that may have resulted in some mail
being returned to the sender. The issue has been
resolved, but if you were expecting email you have not
received, you may want to have the sender resend it.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

The VisIt visualization software has been updated.  If you experience problems with it, please let us know.  You can also run the last version by running 'visit-last'.

Free on campus Matlab seminars on Thursday, March 7th @ NYU’s Kimmel Center, Room 802 (Shorin Studio). 

Session 1 (10am-12pm): Mathematical Modeling with MATLAB

Mathematical models are critical to understanding and accurately simulating the behavior of complex systems. They enable important tasks such as forecasting system behavior for various “what if” scenarios, characterizing system response, and designing control systems.  This session will show how you can use MATLAB products for mathematical modeling tasks, including:
•             Developing models using data fitting and first-principle modeling techniques
•             Optimizing the accuracy of mathematical models
•             Simulating models and post-processing the results
•             Documenting and sharing models
  
You will also learn about different approaches you can use to develop models, including developing models programmatically using the MATLAB language, deriving closed-form analytical equations using symbolic computation, and leveraging prebuilt graphical tools for specific modeling tasks such as curve and surface fitting. 

Session 2 (2pm-4pm):  Parallel Computing with MATLAB

In this session, you will learn how to solve computationally and data-intensive problems using multicore processors, GPUs, and computer clusters. We will introduce you to high-level programming constructs that allow you to parallelize MATLAB applications without CUDA or MPI programming and run them on multiple processors. We will also show you how to overcome the memory limits of your desktop computer and solve problems that require manipulating very large matrices by distributing your data.
  
Highlights include:
•        Toolboxes with built-in support for parallel computing
•        Creating parallel applications to speed up independent tasks
•        Programming with distributed arrays to work with large data sets
•        Scaling up to computer clusters, grid environments, or clouds
•        Tips on developing parallel algorithms

** These technical seminars are FREE for all NYU faculty, staff, researcher and students. **
 
Please contact rheather.wellman at mathworks dot com with any questions.

Compute nodes as well as desktop machines WILL BE REBOOTED on Thursday (March 7th).  Rolling updates will be applied to machines between 8pm and 12am. In an effort to try and minimize any corrupted files or lost work, please save all your data and logout of any linux systems before 8pm. Many of the updates have already been made on several linux machines in the computer lab located in WWH229. We urge people to test any packages that are critical to their work and let us know if they encounter any problems before the updates occur. The machines that have been updated are:

 A full list of all software updates for linux and solaris is available on the update page.

module load python-2.7

For a list of other available modules and software versions available, run:

module avail


A new Courant community driven wiki is now up and running on NYU's WikiSpaces. 

This wiki exists to allow members of the CIMS community to provide any content that they think could be useful to fellow community members.  Consider posting any of the following (or whatever else you think people may want to know about):

• Have a tip about using the computer systems at Courant?  Post it!
• Have a favorite place to eat nearby? Post it!
• Know when/where CIMS people go to socialize? Post it!
• Have an unofficial group that gets together regularly or want to start one?  Post it!
• Know about some great entertainment in the neighborhood? Post it!

Enjoy!

Many CIMS users have received a recent email with the subject "Urgent Attention" referring to a virus.  This email is not from the Courant Systems Group, and should be deleted.

On Monday, January 21st, 2013, around 11pm,  we will shut down the file servers that host users's home directories for updates.  The patching and rebooting process of the servers is expected to last less than 2 hours.  Home directory's as well as dependent services will be unavailable during this time.  You are urged to save all your work and log out of all CIMS systems before 10:30pm to avoid any data loss.

Following up on the home home directory server updates, we'll be doing Linux system updates the following day.  Compute nodes as well as desktop machines WILL BE REBOOTED on Tuesday (Jan. 22nd).  Rolling updates will be applied to machines between 8pm and 12am. In an effort to try and minimize any corrupted files or lost work, please save all your data and logout of any linux systems before 8pm. Many of the updates have already been made on several linux machines in the computer lab located in WWH229. We urge people to test any packages that are critical to their work and let us know if they encounter any problems before the updates occur. The machines that have been updated are:

 A full list of all software updates for linux and solaris is available on the update page.