The purpose of this post is to inform you that we are planning to permanently stop batch operations on the Owl’s Nest HPC cluster on Monday, June 15th, 2026 and eventually will retire the entire system.
We are providing this notice to allow sufficient time to migrate data to a properly maintained new storage location and complete any remaining computational work. Ideally, you should have already done that, because all HPC storage has to be considered temporary and unreliable, but things are rarely in an ideal state. For the few of you who have very large amounts of data stored, please begin transferring it to a new storage location as soon as possible (i.e. now), since the transfer itself can take a substantial amount of time.
The exact planned timeline is as follows:
On Monday June 8th, 2026 at COB, we will stop the batch queues. After this date, no more new jobs can be submitted. Jobs that have been submitted until then - individual or job chains - will continue to be scheduled.
On Monday June 15th, 2026 at COB, we will stop the batch scheduler. After this date, no more pending jobs will be launched.
We plan to keep the login nodes and the storage system online for a few more months to facilitate data transfers or until we have to close it down due to security issues or hardware failures.