RDS Module Updates.

Historically, users have used the rds script to connect to their RDS shares on the cluster along with a credentials file (~/.rds_credentials) stored in an individuals home directory. This allowed users to have their rds6 shares mounted for use across the HPC cluster but depended on plain text credentials being stored on disk which is less than desirable. The HPC cluster team will now be rolling out a new script to encrypt passwords at rest for use with rds6. All functionality of the old rds script remains with connect/disconnect, but with an addition of an option to create the credentials file. To ensure a smooth transition the script will also identify any non-encrypted credential files and encrypt them on the first use. This should prevent any impact or transition issues for existing users.

This module update is scheduled to occur on July 5th, and should not cause any disruption to your workflow. Using the new module we suggest a two step process:

1. On the login nodes you will want to generate your credentials file by running the "rds credentials" command and following the prompts.
2. You will then use the "rds connect" and "rds disconnect" command as has been done historically. 

Job Concurrency Increased

Historically users of the CCHMC HPC environment were limited to a maximum of 75 concurrent CPU cores in use at one time. However as the data size and cpu counts have increased over the years it has become apparent that increased concurrency would benefit both the utilization of the cluster and the throughput of large job submissions.  As of the time of writing, the HPC team has increased the number of CPU cores which can be used concurrently to 100 for all HPC users.