After 5:00 PM on Friday, October 30, 2026, RCAC Staff will not be able to retrieve any data left in the Bell scratch filesystem.

RCAC recommends Gautschi as the successor platform for communities currently using or considering Bell. Gautschi is in production and was introduced as RCAC’s most powerful community cluster to date, with CPU and AI partitions designed to support both traditional simulation workloads and newer AI-oriented research workflows.

For faculty comparing the two platforms, Gautschi provides more cores per CPU node, more standard memory per node, higher large-memory capacity, newer GPU options, and faster NDR InfiniBand connectivity. This makes Gautschi the natural path for Bell users who need continued access to Purdue’s community cluster model after Bell is retired.

Please feel free to contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions or need support.

What’s changing

• Starting July 20 when you connect to datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu, you will be using our newer Data Depot system (Depotv3) instead of the older one (Depotv2).

• The older system will still be available behind the scenes during this transition.

• This is mostly a technical change. It updates how accounts are authenticated and brings Data Depot in line with other RCAC services that already use our newer login system. The goal is to keep Data Depot reliable and consistent with our current environment.

What you need to do

• If you normally use Data Depot by connecting to datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu (for example, a mapped drive like “depot\mylab” on Windows or smb://datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu/depot/mylab on macOS), you should not need to change anything.

• Your existing shortcuts, mapped drives, and scripts that point to datadepot.rcac.purdue.edu should continue to work after the change.

• If you maintain service accounts or automated jobs that use Data Depot, please check them after the change to ensure continued functionality.

• Saved credentials may cause problems with your connectivity to the Data Depot.  If you believe this to be the case, simply remove the saved credentials and re-connect.

If something goes wrong

• If we see problems after the change, RCAC can quickly switch Data Depot back to the older system.

• If you notice issues accessing Data Depot or your mapped drives after this update, please contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Following good data practices makes scratch more performant and more useful for all users. By keeping master copies of important data in backed‑up storage, staging only the inputs and outputs you need for active jobs into scratch, and promptly moving valuable results back to a persistent location when your work completes, you help keep scratch fast, responsive, and available for high‑throughput workloads across the system.

To support this, we’ve updated our scratch documentation with clearer guidance and policies, including:

• An emphasis on scratch as temporary, high‑performance workspace, not long‑term storage.
• Clearer explanation of purge behavior and age limits (including that files may be removed at any time after they become eligible).
• Removal of legacy “purge warning email” language; users should no longer expect email notifications before files are purged.
• Explicit guidance that using tools like touch or other methods to defeat purge mechanisms is a violation of Acceptable Research Resource Use.
• Practical tips and examples for staging data into scratch, monitoring file ages with tools such as purgelist , and moving important results back to Data Depot or Fortress.

Scratch filesystems are engineered for capacity and performance and are not protected by backup technology; some types of failures can result in permanent data loss. If losing a file in scratch would significantly impact your research, that file should have a current copy in a more durable storage location such as Data Depot (for active data) or Fortress (for long‑term archival).

You can review the updated scratch storage guidance here: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/policies/scratchpurge

If you have questions about how to adapt your workflows or where to store particular data, please contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu and we’ll be happy to help.

**Issue: **Some users may not see Microsoft Authenticator push prompts unless they manually open the app. This can cause sign-ins to time out.

Workaround: If you do not see a push notification, open the Microsoft Authenticator app and approve the pending request. Also, please verify that your default sign-in method is set to ‘App based Authentication – notification’ You can follow the steps in this Knowledge Base article to check and update your settings: https://service.purdue.edu/TDClient/32/Purdue/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1788

Still Need Help? - Contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu

Beginning May 11, 2026, RCAC will move from Duo Mobile to Microsoft Authenticator for logging in to Purdue’s research computing and supercomputing systems.

To ensure uninterrupted access, please complete the steps below before May 11.

What you need to do:

Enroll in Microsoft Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) using the Microsoft Authenticator app (if you have not already)

Set your default sign-in method in Microsoft MFA to your preferred method

After May 11, Duo Mobile will no longer work for accessing RCAC systems.

Please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu If you have any questions or need help.

A full catalog of available modules with usage instructions is at the Biocontainers Documentation site. For step-by-step guides on running common genomics workflows on HPC systems, visit the RCAC Bioinformatics Tutorials site, which includes documentation for tools like HiFiasm, BRAKER3, Trinity, and Nextflow, along with best practices for job submission and resource optimization. Full workshop materials are also available for RNA-seq analysis, genome assembly, and genome annotation. For upcoming training sessions and community programs, including the biweekly Genomics Exchange discussion series and the Midwest Bioinformatics Showcase seminar series, see the Computational Biology Services page. For questions or support with bioinformatics workflows on Anvil, contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

This will affect the following services:

• CMS Front-End (aka 'Login') nodes;
• EOS storage;
• XCache;
• CVMFS;
• Hammer cluster SLURM jobs;
• Analysis Facility will operate in reduced capacity:
  • fewer CPUs, RAM and GPUs will be available;
  • CVMFS and EOS mounts will not be available;
  • XCache will not be usable.

Given the scale of the event, we have scheduled a 'full downtime' for our computing resources.

Users will be able to do some interactive work in the AF and the Community Clusters (other than 'Hammer'), as home-directories and Depot storage are not expected to be affected (they are hosted in the MATH Data-Center), but are strongly advised to not depend on the reliability of any services during the power outage period.

The current plan is to have all machines powered down before the end of day (5pm) on Wed. March 4th, and then have them powered back up by start of business (9am) on Thu. March 5th.

Please - plan your use of the resources accordingly. CMS Support Team

During the Purdue AI Research Showcase, IPAI and RCAC will be hosting a poster session. We are calling on all Purdue researchers to submit your posters today!

Poster Session Callout:

Poster Topic: AI research and applications across Purdue—new models, systems, and interdisciplinary breakthroughs solving real‑world challenges. Submissions can include early-stage ideas, works in progress, group projects, or class assignments, not only completed research.

Poster presentation date: April 14-15, 2026; Exact Date and Time: TBD

Poster presentation location: Envision Center, Purdue University West Lafayette Campus

Participation eligibility: Posters authored or co-authored by undergraduate or graduate students, faculty, and staff from any Purdue campus

Awards: Best poster will receive travel expense coverage of up to $1,000 to a conference of their choice!

Parameters: Posters must be 30" wide by 40" long or smaller. Posters may be vertically or horizontally oriented, but the width must be less than 30". More information about wide printing at the Purdue West Lafayette campus can be found here: https://it.purdue.edu/facilities/instructionallabs/printing/wide_format_printing.php

Make sure you submit this *survey to ensure your spot in this event! Once we receive your submission you will receive a follow up email with additional details for the event. Submissions are due no later than Monday, April 13th.

* Registrations are now closed due maximum capacity.

We look forward to your participation and learning more about your research in AI, and don't forget to save the date for the Purdue AI Research Showcase!

During this maintenance window, several clusters will experience a temporary outage so that hardware can be safely powered down while facility work is performed:

• Gautschi, Gilbreth, Negishi, Bell, and Anvil cluster nodes will be powered down.

• The Gilbreth’s legacy V100 GPUs, that are well past their lifetime, will be decommissioned.

• Hammer (Math nodes) and Geddes: A subset of nodes will be powered down but the services will be available, unless communicated separately.

How does this maintenance impact you?

• Clusters listed in this message won’t be available to run jobs during the maintenance.

• Any jobs requesting a walltime which would take them past the start of the maintenance will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

• Users can continue to access their data.

• GenAI studio will remain available. This maintenance will position Purdue to support growing computational needs. Users should see long‑term benefits in system reliability and our ability to support future computing and AI resources.

If you have questions about how this outage will affect your work or need support, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the status of all computing and data resources in an effort to ensure continuous availability.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the ticketing system throughout the holiday period and answer critical issues and problems. Non-critical user issues and questions will be addressed beginning January 5th, 2026. There will also be no coffee hour consultations during this break.

Scratch file purging (on community clusters with scratch space) will continue as normal during the break, so be sure to archive your files in scratch storage. This does not apply to Data Depot or home directories -- only scratch storage.

Have a wonderful break, everyone, and we look forward to great things in the new year!

• All jobs on the cluster will be required to explicitly specify a partition and an account (i.e. your group's name) at submission time. You can find the names of the available partitions and accounts from the showpartitions and slist commands respectively. Any job that does not specify an account and a partition will be rejected at submission time.
• All jobs on the cluster must include an explicit memory request through use of the --mem option. Jobs that do not make an explicit memory request will be rejected and a reasonable default will be suggested.
• Accounts will be renamed to no longer include a suffix designating the type of resource the account contains. This means that groups with multiple types of resources broken into multiple accounts will be consolidated into a single group.
• GPU type will be requested through specifying a partition containing the GPU type rather than submission to an account with a suffix designating that partition. i.e. jobs previously submitted to -A mylab-k will now be specified as -A mylab -p a100-40gb
• The output of slist and the default output of squeue will be modified to reflect the new scheduler design.
• All "shared accounts" such as standby that represent resources outside of your typical "group accounts" will continue to exist but will require a different request syntax.
  • Standby will become a Quality of Service (QoS) and jobs that previously ran under the "standby" account, will now be submitted to your "group account" and be tagged with the standby QoS. I.e. if your job previously used the -A standby option, you would now use -A mylab -q standby

How will this affect you:

1. You will need to change your jobscripts and your method of invocation to include the required options outlined above.
2. If you have any scripts or tooling that rely on the current output of slist or squeue, those scripts will need to be modified to use the new formatted output.

You can prepare for this maintenance by reviewing the new Slurm organization in our user guide's Queues Page.

If you have any questions about these upcoming changes, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Get ready for a 16-week hands-on training series focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). Led by expert instructors, each weekly session builds practical skills for research, development, and deployment.

Weekly Topics & Dates:

Aug 29 – Intro to Python, Numpy, and Pandas (Ashish)
Sep 5 – Python Data Visualization (Ashish)
Sep 12 – Intro to R: Tidyverse, ggplot2, dplyr (Mihir)
Sep 19 – AI Day: Prompt Engineering, RAG, Agents, Finetuning (All)
Sep 26 – ML Fundamentals I: Supervised Learning (Haniye)
Oct 3 – ML Fundamentals II: Unsupervised Learning (Haniye)
Oct 10 – Intro to PyTorch & TensorFlow (Christina)
Oct 17 – Intro to NLP + Hugging Face Transformers (Mihir)
Oct 24 – Intro to LangChain for LLM Apps (Haniye)
Oct 31 – Real-Time LLM Apps with Streamlit & Gradio (TBD)
Nov 7 – Evaluating LLMs: Benchmarks & Metrics (TBD)
Nov 14 – Vector Databases 101: Weaviate, FAISS, Pinecone (Mihir)
Nov 18 – Using LLMs in Scientific Research (TBD)
Nov 22 – Building Research Chatbots (Non-RAG) (TBD)
Dec 5 – Ethics & Governance in Generative AI (Ashish)
Dec 12 – From Data to Deployment: MLOps for LLMs (TBD)

Bonus Module (Pre-recorded):

Intro to Purdue GenAI Studio UI & API – Hands-on demo and custom RAG training

Registration and connection details will be announced soon.

Stay tuned for updates and secure your spot in this exciting series!

• All jobs on the cluster will be required to explicitly specify a partition and an account (i.e. your group's name) at submission time. You can find the names of the available partitions and accounts from the showpartitions and slist commands respectively. Any job that does not specify an account and a partition will be rejected at submission time.
• The output of slist and the default output of squeue will be modified to reflect the new scheduler design.
• All "shared accounts" such as standby, highmem, etc. that represent resources outside of your typical "group accounts" will continue to exist but will require a different request syntax.
  • Standby will become a Quality of Service (QoS) and jobs that previously ran under the "standby" account, will now be submitted to your "group account" and be tagged with the standby QoS. I.e. if your job previously used the -A standby option, you would now use -A mylab -q standby
  • The highmem and gpu shared accounts will become partitions and jobs that previously ran under these accounts will now be submitted to your "group account" and should be submitted to the appropriate partition, i.e., -A highmem will become -A mylab -p highmem
  • Groups with access to the interactive account will now submit to their "group account" and the interactive partition. i.e. -A interactive will become -A mylab -p interactive

How will this affect you:

1. You will need to change your jobscripts and your method of invocation to include the required options outlined above.
2. If you have any scripts or tooling that rely on the current output of slist or squeue, those scripts will need to be modified to use the new formatted output.

You can prepare for this maintenance by reviewing the new Slurm organization in our user guide's Queues Page.

If you have any questions about these upcoming changes, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

• All jobs on the cluster will be required to explicitly specify a partition and an account (i.e. your group's name) at submission time. You can find the names of the available partitions and accounts from the showpartitions and slist commands respectively. Any job that does not specify an account and a partition will be rejected at submission time.
• The output of slist and the default output of squeue will be modified to reflect the new scheduler design.
• All "shared accounts" such as standby, highmem, etc. that represent resources outside of your typical "group accounts" will continue to exist but will require a different request syntax.
  • Standby will become a Quality of Service (QoS) and jobs that previously ran under the "standby" account, will now be submitted to your "group account" and be tagged with the standby QoS. I.e. if your job previously used the -A standby option, you would now use -A mylab -q standby
  • The highmem and gpu shared accounts will become partitions and jobs that previously ran under these accounts will now be submitted to your "group account" and should be submitted to the appropriate partition, i.e., -A highmem will become -A mylab -p highmem

How will this affect you:

1. You will need to change your jobscripts and your method of invocation to include the required options outlined above.
2. If you have any scripts or tooling that rely on the current output of slist or squeue, those scripts will need to be modified to use the new formatted output.

You can prepare for this maintenance by reviewing the new Slurm organization in our user guide's Queues Page.

If you have any questions about these upcoming changes, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

In order to aid in that transition, we have made a test environment available to users so they can begin re-building their applications under the new toolchains and exploring the new software stack. We expect that this environment will not change much ahead of the maintenance next week, but we may end up making small changes to the application stack before then.

This test environment can be accessed by using the command ssh gilbreth-fe05 from any Gilbreth's front end nodes. The Slurm queues you are used to should be present and will submit to test nodes. Wait times may be larger for these test nodes due to their only being a limited number of nodes available for testing.

If you encounter issues or have questions about this maintenance, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

If you have any questions about the upcoming maintenance, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

In order to aid in that transition, we have made a test environment available to users so they can begin rebuilding their applications under the new toolchains and exploring the new software stack. We expect that this environment will not change much ahead of the maintenance next week, but we may end up making small changes to the application stack before then.

This test environment can be accessed by using the combination Slurm options -A debug --reservation=rocky8test in your current job submission with sbatch or sinteractive from any Bell’s front end nodes. This will make sure to submit to test nodes. Wait times may be larger for these test nodes due to their only being a limited number of nodes available for testing. The limitation on the debug queue is: 1 concurrent running job and 4 job submissions for each user with a 30-minute’s max walltime.

If you encounter issues or have questions about this maintenance, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

If you have any questions about the upcoming maintenance, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.