Blog from October, 2016

This upgrade has been rescheduled for Thursday, November 3 at 5PM


The Sympa mailing list server (lists.lbl.gov) will be offline due to a scheduled upgrade on Thursday, November 3, 2016 from 5 PM to 8 PM.  

This outage will impact all mailing lists provided by lists.lbl.gov including all Level 1 email lists.

During the upgrade, Sympa lists will be unavailable.   Messages should be delivered when the the outage is complete.

The Sympa service will be upgraded to the most current version; the operating system on which the server runs will also be upgraded to make use of performance and security improvements.  


When accessing software.lbl.gov from off-site or LBNL-Visitor wireless you might encounter an error page or apache test page.

Please be advised that issue will be resolved by Monday, 10/24/2016 in the meantime please access the page using VPN connection.

If you have questions or need assistance please contact the Help Desk at 510-486-4357

Biologists and neuroscientists at Stanford have standardized on Singularity for deploying and executing their BIDS  (Brain Imaging Data Structure) stack and bridging their development environments (desktops, workstations, and local servers) to traditional HPC. The workflows can now be distributed, archived and leveraged as well as run on any HPC resources that have Singularity installed. Stanford (among other sites) is now running these Singularity containers in production on their local HPC system (Sherlock) as well as on XSEDE resources like Comet at the San Diego Supercomputing Center and Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Developed by the IT Division HPC Services architect Gregory Kurtzer, Singularity facilitates application and workflow portability across different environments including HPC by allowing the user to package their applications, libraries, and operating environment into an image or container that can be run elsewhere. In HPC environments, Singularity containers have access to local and shared filesystems as well as having support for MPI. Users who develop their applications on their laptop or desktop now have a way to run their personal environment and applications on a HPC cluster.

Next week, there will be a presentation on Singularity at the IT Division’s LabTech 2016 event on Tuesday Oct 11 and also at the portable-hpc.net DOE Lab conference on Weds Oct 12.


Routine fire protection work led to an unscheduled major data center outage at approximately 11:45AM today Wed Oct 5.  It will take a substantial amount of time to recover HPC systems.   Return to service time not currently known.