News

February 2020 Maintenance
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrade to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Mangi will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on February 5. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on February 5 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. February maintenance will include:
LabQi Cluster Decommissioning
MSI's LabQi Cluster will be shut down and decommissioned during February Maintenance (February 5, 2020). Several months ago, MSI released the Mesabi Interactive Queue as a replacement for the LabQi Cluster (ssh lab). The Mesabi Interactive Queue can be used in real-time for tasks such as interactive data exploration, creating plots or images, visualizations, or testing sections of code that will be used on other MSI queues. Here are several examples of how you can request an interactive HPC job on the new Mesabi Interactive Queue.
MSI PI George Weiblen Profiled by Bell Museum
The Bell Museum has published a profile of Professor George Weiblen (science director and curator of plants, Bell Museum; Plant and Microbial Biology). Professor Weiblen is an expert in plants in Papua New Guinea, and co-founded a research center there. He uses MSI for phylogenetic analyses of plants using next-generation sequencing data.
Global Scratch Storage Policy Changes
After consulting with MSI’s advisory committee, we are making a few changes to the way that Global Scratch Storage is managed to address some performance issues. Most users will not be impacted by this change. Due to the intense demands placed on our global scratch system, users have observed highly variable performance making it difficult to rely on this system when designing workflows. In the past few months these demands have, at times, caused the global scratch systems to completely stop functioning.
Using Bison to Protect an Ecosystem
A video narrated by MSI PI Forest Isbell (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; associate director, Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (CCESR)) describes a project that has introduced bison into the CCESR to see whether their foraging behavior can benefit the oak savanna ecosystem. The video is from the Big Ten Network and can be found on the network’s YouTube page. 
MSI PI Sylia Wilson Recognized by APS
MSI PI Sylia Wilson (assistant professor, Institute of Child Development), was recently named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. This award recognizes early-career researchers for the excellence of their work. An article about Professor Wilson and her research appears on the College of Education and Human Development website: Wilson Named APS Rising Star.
Mathematical Model of Molecular Interactions
MSI PI Casem Sarkar (associate professor, Biomedical Engineering) is the senior author on recently published research concerning molecular interactions. The authors developed a mathematical model to simulate the effects of key parameters controlling interactions between molecules with multiple binding sites. Such molecules are common in drug development.
Cuttlefish Depth Perception
Research by MSI PI Trevor Wardill (assistant professor, Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior) into the vision of cuttlefish has received international attention. In a recently published by the journal Science Advances, Professor Wardill and his colleagues described putting 3D glasses on a cuttlefish and showing it videos of shrimp in order to see if these cephalopods had depth perception, as humans do.
MSI Working With the Soil Health Partnership
The Soil Health Partnership, an initiative of the National Corn Growers Association, is working with MSI to use the GEMS platform. The goal is to develop a way that farmers can predetermine the right mix of plants and methods to optimize their crop yields and minimize harmful environmental effects. A story about this project appeared recently on the Minnesota Corn Growers Association’s blog: Supercomputing Comes to Ag. MSI staff members Dr.
MSI PI Lucy Fortson Recognized for Leadership of Zooniverse
MSI PI Lucy Fortson (professor, Physics and Astronomy) has received recognition from the American Physical Society (APS) for her leadership of the citizen-science platform Zooniverse.org, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December.
January 2020 Maintenance
On Wednesday, January 8, 2020, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrade to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, Mangi, and Itasca will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on January 8. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on January 8 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status.January maintenance will include:

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