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Sept 2026 HPCF Newsletter

Happy end of September everyone,

I'm writing to give everyone an update regarding the UMBC HPCF and other Research Computing projects currently undertaken by DoIT during the month of September.

Summary

  • Downtime Scheduled for October 27th
  • Did You Know? Slurm Development Partition!
  • Evaluating the NVIDIA GB10 for Cost-Effective AI Workloads
  • HPCF Supports hackUMBC 2026
  • Shared Infrastructure Governance Committees Reminder

Downtime Scheduled for October 27th

The DoIT Research Computing & Data team is planning a downtime on October 27th. Please plan your workloads and batch jobs accordingly, as cluster services will be temporarily unavailable during this window and jobs will be canceled during this window. We appreciate your patience as we complete these updates to ensure a more robust and high-performing computing environment.

We will send out a reminder with additional details two weeks prior to the downtime.

Did You Know? Slurm Development Partition!

Need to quickly debug a script or test code before launching a long run? Don't forget about our Slurm development partition!

We launched this partition earlier this summer specifically for short-duration test runs. It currently has low queue times, making it the perfect tool to verify your setup before queueing up in the production partitions. Check out our documentation for job time limits and submission flags.

Evaluating the NVIDIA GB10 for Cost-Effective AI Workloads

To explore more accessible compute options for our research community, we are currently testing a new NVIDIA GB10 system. We’re assessing how effectively this lower-cost hardware handles AI-driven tasks and whether it can serve as a practical, economical fit for user workflows.

Stay tuned for an update in an upcoming newsletter once our benchmarking and evaluations are complete!

HPCF Supports hackUMBC 2026

hackUMBC took place over this past weekend, and HPCF was proud to assist by allocating a GPU node from the chip-gpu cluster for participants to use throughout the event. Congratulations to all the organizers and students on another great hackathon!

Shared Infrastructure Governance Committees Reminder

The next meetings of the SIG Subcommittees are posted as events to the HPCF myUMBC Group and shared below.See the full schedule at this link.

Publications
If you have any publications, presentations, theses, or other works that made use of the campus cluster, please submit an RT Ticket with bibliographic information so that we can accurately reflect this work in our records and on the HPCF Website. 

Need Help?
As always, please communicate any issues/questions to the Research Computing RT Queue (hpcf.umbc.edu > User Support > Request Help).

Wake me up when September ends.
Gregory Ballantine,
HPC System Administrator

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Posted: September 30, 2026, 4:19 PM

Read Original Post in myUMBC