As you know over the last few years, we have built an entirely new HPC/AI environment, support system and infrastructure in partnership with UMass Amherst called UNITY: https://unity.uri.edu. We have received very positive feedback on Unity from all types of HPC/AI users at URI, and just performed a major upgrade to the system increasing capacity for URI users by ~50%. Unity is located at the MGHPCC, which is a cutting-edge near-zero Carbon facility specially designed for research computing by major research universities in our region.
For these reasons, we are transitioning URI users away from Andromeda to Unity over the next few months. Once the transition is complete, we will relocate viable Andromeda hardware and merge it into Unity so that there is minimal loss of compute capacity for URI.
Here are the details of this transition plan:
1. Our team will offer focused support to Andromeda users to aid their transition to Unity over the next few months.
2. Research data transfer to Unity would be the top priority right from the beginning. Since some data transfers may take a long time, we will not set a deadline for moving data off the NAS storage systems attached to Andromeda.
3. After May 30th, we will shut down the Andromeda compute nodes thus halting the execution of any future jobs. And we will change the filesystem to read-only mode. Users would still be able to migrate their files over to Unity.
4. We will schedule a full shutdown of Andromeda at URI on July 1st. We will package and ship the viable Andromeda hardware to the MGHPCC and have it integrated into Unity and make it available by September 1st.