Colonial One, GW’s inaugural HPC cluster has served the university since 2013, setting the foundation for growth in this specialized area. In August 2018, the more robust and powerful Pegasus HPC cluster was added to GW’s HPC capabilities. Since Pegasus came online, the majority of Colonial One's research groups have been migrated to the Pegasus cluster.
Now that Pegasus is in full operation and the Colonial One HPC service agreements have come to their end, it is time to decommission the legacy Colonial One HPC cluster, and retire this out-of-support computational and storage system. Following a gradual reduction in service capacity, Colonial One’s decommission is scheduled to be complete by July 15, 2020.
To prepare for the successful transition, the NFS file system used for user and group storage (/home and /groups) will become read-only on Wednesday, July 8. In addition, the Dell Compellent storage system operated by CCAS (/import) and used to supplement the Colonial One NFS for various research groups, will be attached to Pegasus until October 2020, as this system is also approaching its end of service.
The sun-setting of this cluster has been discussed at various HPC user group meetings over the past several months. While most user accounts, groups, and their respective data and applications have already been migrated from Colonial One to Pegasus, some migrations still remain. Researchers are encouraged to move any remaining data off the Colonial One HPC and complete the migration to Pegasus before July 8, 2020. GW Information Technology’s Research Technology Services team is working closely with user groups to transition the remaining elements.
Some applications from the Colonial One HPC may not be compatible with the newer operating system of Pegasus, or may require some unforeseen engineering. RTS and the HPC Support Specialists will work together with researchers to port as many applications as feasible and find reasonable accommodations for these unusual circumstances. If you have questions, please contact hpchelp@gwu.edu.
While the Colonial One cluster will be retired, the domain associated with Colonial One will remain and serve as an umbrella brand for continued enhancements to GW’s HPC capabilities.
The four login nodes for Pegasus can be accessed by ssh'ing to pegasus.colonialone.gwu.edu. See our Pegasus section for how to connect.
As this process continues, please reach out to hpchelp@gwu.edu with any questions or comments.
