Aire Progress Update - May

This is a short update to keep everyone up to date on the progress of Aire, the University’s new High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. 

 

Aire Future State 

Last update, we told you about the new network switches that will be installed and configured.  The hardware has now been installed, and the new configuration is being applied.

 

 Aire Lustre Maintenance 

 As part of improvements to how we manage storage on the Aire cluster, a maintenance window is scheduled for Wednesday 14th May 2025, starting at 9am until Thursday 15th May at 9am  

The Aire cluster, including all login and compute nodes, will be unavailable from 9am on Wednesday 14th May while the Lustre work is carried out. You can continue to submit jobs as normal before the downtime; any jobs that can finish before 9am will run, and any others will be held in the queue and resume automatically once the system is back online. Please ensure you complete any interactive work and log out before the maintenance begins. No data loss is expected, but as Lustre storage is not backed up, we strongly recommend backing up any important files in advance. 

 

Calder 

A few weeks ago we introduced you to Calder, the University’s next HPC system. 

Since then, the tender was released to market on 24th April and we are currently in the response period. This is the vendors opportunity to ask Leeds any questions or to clarify anything in the tender documents.  

  

ARC4 Shutdown 

As we’ve said in previous updates, ARC4 is nearing its end of life and will be decommissioned soon.  We can now confirm the decommissioning timeline: 

• No new user accounts have been created on ARC4 since 1st April 2025. 
• ARC4 will remain available for compute jobs until 20th June 2025, at which point all job queues will be disabled. 
• Users will still be able to access ARC4 storage until 20th August 2025, when the system will be fully decommissioned. 

 

Everyone can continue to use ARC4 until June 2025 if they need to, but Aire should be considered the default HPC now. If you're still actively using ARC4, we recommend transitioning your workflows to Aire as soon as possible to ensure continuity. 

Keep an eye out for further updates on ARC4 in future communications. 

 

Please continue to add any comments or questions into the Teams channel, and we will keep you updated.

 

If you are interested in more information about Aire, please read our previous blog posts:

• Aire Progress Update - April
• Aire Progress Update - March
• Aire Configuration Update & Upcoming Data Centre Visit
• Aire Progress Update - February
• Aire Progress Update - January
• Supporting Teaching and Learning: Updates on ARC4 and Aire Transition
• First look at PyTorch on Aire
• Exploring the Power of Aire: A First Look at Performance Gains