CELS Systems Thanksgiving Newsletter

Hi, everyone! It’s been too long since I’ve written one of these, so we’ve got a lot to go over. I’m going to try to keep this brief, since I’m fully aware that if I unleash a firehose of information at you, what I’ll end up with is a lot of confused people who only know they’re wet and don’t understand why.

New faces

Since we last spoke, we’ve had a few changes in the team, so let’s introduce everyone!

• In July, Nick Fatigati joined our team in as part of our user support team. No doubt many of you have had interactions with him by this point, since he’s on-site just about every day.
• In August, Tim Livolsi (not a new face) took on a new role in the High Performance and Institutional Computing (HPIC) team, working on supporting the LCRC clusters and other resources in that group.
• In September, we were joined by Taylor Cohron and Matt Cashdollar as Site Reliability Engineers in our Research Computing team. They’re both part of the team working on GCE systems as well as the CELS AI testbed incubator.
• Lastly, this October, Isaac Chavez joined us as a student intern, assisting with user support and other on-site tasks.

You can see the whole team at https://anl.box.com/v/CELSSystemsOrgChart, and astute observers will also notice we’ve got a couple of openings. If you think you know someone who might be a good fit as either an Information Security Lead for CELS, or a Network Administrator, please let me know!

New GPU node

compute-08.cels.anl.gov is up and running and is our first general use GPU node in GCE. We have more in the pipeline. See https://help.cels.anl.gov/docs/linux/login-compute-and-home-nodes/ for the specs on our current general use compute nodes in GCE. We’ll announce the new ones as we bring them online. Similarly, we hope to soon have a Mac Studio added to the general use macOS nodes soon.

Changes coming to some services

In order to meet DOE cybersecurity requirements, we’ve got a few changes coming in some of the cloud services we manage for CELS.

Slack: There are one or two details to iron out, but assuming that goes as planned, effective December 12, 2022, our Slack workspace (https://cels-anl.slack.com) will require SSO for login. Separately, I will write a more detailed explanation of what this means and how it will be rolled out and post it to Slack as well, but one side effect is that full members will need to use their Argonne accounts to login. Anyone without an Argonne login will need to become guest users or interact via Slack Connect.

Overleaf: We were recently able to renew our Overleaf subscription for another three years. An integral part of getting it approved by the Site Office was enforcing Single Sign-On. We’re working through this process with Overleaf as I write this, and once we have the final details set I’ll separately announce a date. I expect it will also be prior to the year-end holiday break.

Be sure to check out our Service Catalog for the various service offerings we provide in CELS Systems.

Legacy Retirement Update

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been slowly but surely turning off services as we migrate them to our replacements in GCE. At this point, all WordPress sites from press3.mcs.anl.gov that were active were migrated to wordpress.cels.anl.gov, and the old URLs now point there. If you find something missing, let us know at [email protected].

We’ve migrated almost all the MediaWiki sites we know needed migrating to the new server as well. MediaWiki is no longer a service we’re actively providing, but we have to retain some sites for historical purposes. If you think you have a MediaWiki site that needs retaining, let us know at [email protected], and we’ll work to get it moved over, or help migrate it to a new service.

As for our git services, the clock is ticking for gitlab.cels.anl.gov (internal only), and xgitlab.cels.anl.gov. Both services will be retired before the year end break. If you haven’t already requested a migration to git.cels.anl.gov, please do so at help.cels.anl.gov via the link in the lower right side of the page.

Next on the list for us to work on is Subversion (svn). We had previously planned to retire this service entirely, but it’s come to light we need to keep it going a bit longer for some ongoing projects. However, we do need to reduce the number of instances and flavors we’re running. We also will not be supporting Trac in GCE. If your project requires the features in Trac, we recommend migrating to git and using git.cels.anl.gov. A more detailed announcement will come on this as we settle on how to implement the service in GCE.

Very few user-accessible systems exist in Legacy right now. It’s just a couple of login nodes that you can only reach from inside so that you can migrate your files to GCE. I will start beating this drum a little louder when we come into December, and a full press to retire that system will start in January with an eye to shutdown at the end of that month.

And just a reminder that the legacy Confluence server collab.cels.anl.gov will be retired early next year. There’s been a notification banner on that site for some time. At this point, we are targeting Monday, January 9, 2023. After that point, we will point the old hostname at the new confluence.cels.anl.gov server.

Getting equipment from us

Back in May we introduced self-service pick up and drop-off via our new safes. Since then, we’ve significantly expanded the capacity, and I want to take a second to remind you all about this. Full instructions are here, but here’s a brief rundown.

You can pick up or drop off just about anything using these safes located outside 2109/2110. There are printed instructions on the safes,, so if you leave something just lock it up and let us know how to get it!

One important note is that due to theft from locked office (yes, it has happened, and surprisingly recently), we’re no longer able to leave equipment in your office. If we can’t hand it to you in person via a schedule, we’ll use the safe.

What am I thankful for?

I’m thankful for thermal underwear, peanut butter, people named Horace, and the Oxford comma. But mostly, I’m thankful for the awesome team I get to work with and the amazing group of people we get to support. Thanks for being you! You’re very good at it!

Have a great holiday!