Dear NERSC Users: As promised late last year, I’m writing today to provide you with the latest information on Cori’s retirement date. We plan to operate the main Cori system through the end of April. No special allocation is necessary to use Cori; charging against your NERSC CPU Node Hour allocation will continue just like it did in 2022. We will begin decommissioning auxiliary systems associated with Cori at the end of March. On March 31 at noon, we will retire the Cori GPU nodes and take the large memory nodes offline in preparation for their migration to Perlmutter. The Haswell and KNL nodes will continue to operate through the end of April. Please understand that Cori is an old system that has reached the end of its lifetime. Its first hardware arrived in 2015 and Cori has been in service longer than any other system in NERSC’s 49-year history. Keeping an HPC system of this age running poses a number of challenges. At this point, we must rely upon refurbished or scavenged parts when something fails. Realistically, we may need to shrink and reconfigure Cori if certain parts in the system fail, which will require a longer downtime than our typical monthly maintenance. Of particular concern is Cori’s scratch file system. The inventory of spare parts for the scratch system is dangerously low and a failure could result in substantial data loss – meaning it is even more imperative to copy important data from scratch to a safe, reliable location such as HPSS, CFS, or another location outside of NERSC. We understand that not everyone has migrated their workflows from Cori to Perlmutter. We advise you to start now if you have not already done so. To help ease the transition, NERSC will offer an additional series of office hours beginning in February; we will provide updated details in later communications. If your workflow cannot be performed on Perlmutter for any technical reason, please contact us <https://help.nersc.gov> immediately so that we can understand your use case and assist in your migration to Perlmutter. Please join us on February 16 <https://www.nersc.gov/users/NUG/teleconferences/nug-meeting-february-16-2023/> for the next NERSC Users Group monthly meeting to learn more about Cori’s retirement. Regards, -Rebecca -- Rebecca Hartman-Baker, Ph.D User Engagement Group Leader National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center | Berkeley Lab rjhartmanbaker@lbl.gov | phone: (510) 486-4810 fax: (510) 486-6459 Pronouns: she/her/hers _______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users@nersc.gov