HPC News & Changes

This page is intended to act as a timeline of events for the Comet HPC project, as well as major changes in functionality or policies relating to the system.

Newsletters

Starting March 2026, we also publish a monthly summary newsletter to the HPC-Users email distribution list (to which all users of Comet are subscribed):

(8th) May 2026 - Upcoming Comet Maintenance (22nd May)

A change request to have Comet taken down for maintenance has now been approved by NUIT. This work will take place on Friday the 22nd of May and will mean Comet will be out of action for a full working day (9:00am - 5:00pm).

A maintenance reservation is being added which will mean any jobs you submit now which would overlap this date will not be accepted. Jobs which run up to this date will be scheduled and run as normal.

The work being undertaken includes:

  • Fitting additional RAM (+128GB) in each of the four Lustre servers to improve high IO load performance and reduce the possibility of system failure in extreme IO load situations.
  • Shutdown, update and restart of the faulty Infiniband backplane network controller, allowing us to reintroduce the isolated GPU nodes (hgpu001 and gpu004).
  • Replacing a faulty network uplink cable optic from Comet to the Campus network which is causing intermittent network dropouts between Comet login nodes and Campus.
  • Downgrade of the Linux kernel drivers and Lustre client software on the two login nodes to match the versions used on all other nodes (our vendor believes that because they are out-of-sync, this is the source of the poor performance of copying data from external - eg RDW - to /nobackup)
  • Increase size of Linux kernel network buffer on the NFS (home & software) storage server to cope with increased user load and reduce packet drop/retransmit figures

This work will involve our support vendor performing the fixes both on-site and remotely.

(6th) May 2026 - Matlab 2026

Matlab 2026a is now available on Comet as a module. It is the default when using module load MATLAB, though the previous version (2024a) can still be selected if you supply the full version.

Open OnDemand has also been updated to use 2026a as the default version, again the previous version can be selected for new OOD sessions, if you wish.

Previous Updates

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