The Users Bulletin provides a summary of new policies, procedures, and events of interest to MSI users. It is published quarterly.
To request technical assistance with your MSI account, please contact help@msi.umn.edu.
1. Leadership Changes at MSI: Director of Research Computing Claudia Neuhauser, who has been the MSI Director since March 2015, is leaving the University of Minnesota for a position at the University of Houston. Professor Neuhauser’s last day at the University will be June 22 .
A new Associate VP for Research/Director of Research Computing will be selected after the new VP for Research is selected in the fall. MSI is under the leadership of Senior Associate Director Jim Wilgenbusch. Any questions regarding MSI that formerly were directed to Professor Neuhauser can now be sent to Dr. Wilgenbusch.
2. CentOS Upgrade: During the June 6 Maintenance Day, MSI released two CentOS 7 testing queues on Mesabi. The two queues, centos7 and centos7gpu, can be used by users to test software and scripts with CentOS 7. Also, users can test the use of Singularity and containers within these queues.
The centos7 queue consists of 4 nodes and has a 4-hour wall time limit. The centos7gpu queue has 2 nodes and has a 4-hour wall time limit. Jobs can be submitted to these test queues using the following commands:
qsub -q centos7 yourscriptname
qsub -q centos7gpu yourscriptname
MSI has initial plans to upgrade all of Mesabi to CentOS 7 during the August 1 Maintenance Day. We are currently testing different software packages on CentOS 7.
If you have issues with your software packages in the CentOS 7 environment, please notify the Help Desk at help@msi.umn.edu.
3. FY19 Service Rates: MSI is updating service rates for internal customers for the upcoming fiscal year. These can can be found in the Service Catalog on the MSI website. Rates for external customers are unchanged from FY18.
4. Deep Learning at MSI: MSI has installed software and created tutorials to assist users getting started with machine-learning techniques, and is continuing to test new environments and hardware. Any users interested in this topic are invited to join the Deep Learning forum.
5. Summer Tutorials: The Summer tutorial schedule is posted on the MSI website.
Tutorials are now being live-streamed on the MSI YouTube channel. Tutorials can also be viewed on the channel at any time.
6. Acknowledgment of MSI in Publications: Please acknowledge MSI in your published works (e.g., posters, research reports, journal articles, abstracts, and talks) where MSI resources (computing, data storage, visualization, staff, etc.) contributed to your published research results.
- You can either list MSI in your affiliations in the byline, or cite MSI in the acknowledgments section (including, at a minimum, "Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI)” and "University of Minnesota").
- On posters or in slide presentations, you can use the MSI wordmark; please contact Tracey Bartlett (bartl033@umn.edu) to get a copy of the wordmark.
- We have discovered that many MSI users still have copies of old MSI logos and wordmarks. Please do not use these! They are outdated (old unit names, etc.) and do not meet current University standards.
- We prefer that you do not use logos copied from MSI’s website and social media accounts.
The following is a more complete example of how you could acknowledge MSI:
The authors acknowledge the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota for providing resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper.
This text can also be found in a couple of locations on the MSI website: The FAQ How do I properly cite MSI to acknowledge the use I have made of MSI’s resources for my research? and the Acknowledgments page in the Research @ MSI section.
7. Useful Webpages: Looking for help with using MSI? One of these pages may have the information you need:
b. Getting Started (includes Quickstart Guides)
c. MSI Systems
e. Staff Listing and Areas of Expertise