Dear Bridges User,

After five years of enabling research and discovery, PSC will be decommissioning the Bridges platform in the coming weeks. All Bridges users with active grants will be transferred to PSC’s new flagship system, Bridges-2, upon the completion of the Bridges-2 Early User Period. Bridges-2 is nearing the end of the Early User Program (EUP), and we are excited for everyone to start using Bridges-2.

Some users may already be running on Bridges-2 as part of the Early User Program (EUP).  This message will not affect the EUP in any way.

We anticipate that Bridges-2 will be available for the larger research community beginning February 15, 2021.  As we prepare to move accounts from Bridges to Bridges-2 we wanted to provide you with some information to help facilitate a seamless transition. 

Account Creation, Transfer and Notifications

You may receive notification from XSEDE indicating that your account has been removed from Bridges.  Please note that while your account may have been added at that point to Bridges-2, you will be allowed to continue using Bridges until February 15.  Please note that access to the Bridges filesystems will remain in place for multiple weeks beyond this date.

Please continue to use the XSEDE Allocations Portal for any of your Bridges-2 allocation needs.

Differences Between Bridges and Bridges-2

While there are many similarities between Bridges and Bridges-2, you should refer to the new Bridges-2 User Guide to familiarize yourself with the subtle differences.

Bridges RM users will note that the new Bridges-2 RM nodes have 128 cores per node. Most of Bridges-2 RM nodes have 256GB of RAM, however 16 RM nodes have 512GB.  GPU users and GPU-AI users will enjoy access to new nodes containing 8 NVIDIA V100-32GB GPUs.  Bridges LM users will begin using the 96 core, 4TB RAM nodes of the Bridges-2 EM cluster.

You will notice that your home and storage directories on Bridges-2 are: 

/jet/home/userid

/ocean/projects/groupid/userid  

Please update your scripts accordingly.  

File Transfer Tools

Once your allocation lands on Bridges-2, we welcome you to start transferring your files.  General information for file transfer can be found in the Bridges-2 User Guide.  To help you specifically with porting your /pylon5 files to your new /ocean space, we have created a script on Bridges-2 called filemover.  Please see filemover documentation for more information.

As noted above, Bridges’ pylon filesystem will be available for a short time after Bridges is decommissioned, but we encourage you to copy any necessary files to Bridges-2 as soon as possible to avoid losing them! 

Two other tools which can be helpful for file usage on Bridges-2 are projects and my_quotas. See the Account Administration section of the Bridges-2 User Guide for more information on these tools.

Welcome to Bridges-2!

As we bid Bridges a fond farewell, we welcome you to Bridges-2! As always, please let us know if you have any questions or problems by sending email to help@psc.edu and someone will be with you as soon as possible.

The Bridges and Bridges-2 Teams