Starting at approximately 3:45pm on Wednesday, Jul 10 we will be updating sphere‘s hardware. The new sphere will have 2 6-core Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs and 64GB of RAM in an energy-efficient system. There will be a shared scratchspace area that users can use to temporarily store files during computations. Please note that the scratchspace area WILL NOT BE BACKED UP and any files put there could be erased or deleted without warning at any time. For example, a user with account name janedoe can use the scratchspace in:
/DO_NOT_BACK_UP/scratch/janedoe
It is expected that the hardware changeover will not be very difficult, but not quite all of the software will be ready yet. We have newer versions of most of the software from the old sphere. We will need Thursday to install the new Mathematica and currently there are negotiations underway to get a version of maple for sphere. In order to understand usage could you please let us know (at requests@math.toronto.edu) if you have used maple in the last three years and if you think having maple on the new sphere is important.
A newer, larger version of coxeter is also being planned for later this summer.
Please type bigjobs on coxeter or visit:
http://www.math.toronto.edu/help/bigjobs.txt
to read the guidelines for running large programs on our departmental systems.
We expect that sphere will be back up around 4:15pm if there are no unforeseen problems. Please let us know (at requests@math.toronto.edu) if you have any problems with or questions about the new sphere.
