News

On Wednesday, April 3, 2024, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month’s scheduled maintenance period, primary storage, Mesabi, Mangi, and Agate will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on April 3. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on April 3 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. Systems status is always available on our Status page.

MSI PI Keith Barker (associate professor, Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; Curator of Genetic Resources Collection, Bell Museum) appeared on a recent edition of WCCO-TV’s regular feature, Good Question. The question was, “How do birds know when to migrate?” Professor Barker explained the internal clocks and local environmental conditions that cause different bird species to migrate.

James “JJ” Johnson, who worked at MSI as a senior software developer for many years, passed away on March 1, 2024. JJ worked on the University of Minnesota’s Galaxy and Galaxy-P projects. His work was a great help to cancer and informatics researchers at the University and elsewhere. The staff of Research Computing and MSI will miss his humor, kindness, and professional skill.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month’s scheduled maintenance period, primary storage, Mesabi, Mangi, and Agate will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on March 6. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on March 6 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. Systems status is always available on our Status page.

The Earl E. Bakken Medical Devices Center (MDC) has announced that their next Director will be MSI PI Hubert Lim (professor, Otolaryngology and Biomedical Engineering). The MDC, which is part of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine, supports the advancement of medical device innovation.

After nearly a decade of service to researchers at the University of Minnesota, the Mesabi computing cluster will be retired on June 5, 2024 and MSI’s clusters will be reconfigured during Summer 2024. The Mangi nodes, which have been attached to Mesabi, will remain in service and be attached to Agate under the new arrangement. Agate will also be expanded with newly purchased nodes in the late summer of 2024.   Impacts for MSI users   SLURM Partitions:   SLURM Partitions retiring on June 5:

On Wednesday, February 7, 2024, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month’s scheduled maintenance period, primary storage, Mesabi, Mangi, and Agate will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on February 7, 2024. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on February 7, 2024 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status.

Four MSI PIs are among the recipients of the 2023 research grants from the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics. These grants are given to project collaborations between researchers at the U of M and the Mayo Clinic. The projects with MSI PIs are: Minnesota Functional Omics Resources (MNFORce)

Four MSI PIs have been named to the 2023 class of inductees to the U of M’s Academies for Excellence. This honor recognizes outstanding faculty in scientific research, education scholarship, clinical practice, and team science. The MSI PIs are: Academy for Excellence in Health Research