October HPCF Newsletter

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:24:25 -0500
website

Hi everyone,

I'm writing to give everyone an update regarding the UMBC HPCF and other Research Computing projects currently undertaken by DoIT.

Summary

Updating the Office Hours Appointment Form

Staff will be continuing to reach out to PIs in an effort to continue migrating to the new RRStor system

SIG Committee meetings updates and new "User Support" SIG group

Office Hours

We've recently seen an increase in the number of Office Hour appointments scheduled with little description of the issue at hand. As a result, we are changing the implementation of the Office Hour sign-up process. All users must now have submitted an RT ticket before making an appointment (virtual or in person) with our staff.

If you would prefer to speak with a staff member in person without an RT form, you can do so by joining our drop-in office hours which happen weekly on Fridays from 13:30ET to 14:30ET. When coming with questions please note that it is a first come, first served system, and to have as much information ready as possible. Remember, the faster we can get started on your issue, the faster we can fix it.

You can see a listing of all drop-in office hour times on the HPCF myUMBC group events listing: https://my3.my.umbc.edu/groups/hpcf/events

For scheduling an office hour appointment, please refer to this page: https://hpcf.umbc.edu/help/office-hours/

Migration of Storage Volumes

At this time, we have about 40% of all migrations completed. All migrations have been scheduled and our plan to sunset the Isilon volumes completely by Thanksgiving is on track.

SIG
Please see the Shared Infrastructure Governance webpage for more information and past meeting materials.

The SIG-CPU Committee met October 2, and meeting minutes will be made available after approval by the group.

The SIG-GPU Committee met October 27, and meeting minutes will be made available after approval by the group.

The SIG-Cloud Committee will be scheduling a meeting in the near future. Expect an announcement via this myUMBC group shortly.

The SIG-User Experience Group met for the first time on October 21. Meeting minutes will be made available after approval by the group. We want to thank everyone who attended the first meeting of the User Experience Committee. We heard great feedback, and want to encourage all users of Research Computing Infrastructure to join us for the next one, scheduled November 18th at 13:30ET.

Publications
If you have any publications, presentations, theses, or other works that made use of the campus cluster(s), please submit an RT Ticket with bibliographic information so that we can accurately reflect this work in our records and on the HPCF Website.

Need Help?
As always, please communicate any issues/questions to the Research Computing RT Queue (hpcf.umbc.edu > User Support > Request Help).

Max Breitmeyer

HPC System Administrator