Will the migration from Lisa to Snellius have any impact on my work?

We aim to keep operational impact to a minimum. Our advisors will be in touch to review and discuss. The user environment on Snellius is very similar to that on Lisa. In most cases, your existing workflow on Lisa used for creating and running batch jobs can be applied directly on Snellius, perhaps with some minor modifications. We do request existing Lisa users to migrate their own data (and any ACLs) to their new Snellius account, as mentioned above.

Will I need to go elsewhere for computing services? 

Although the Lisa hardware is decommissioned, we will continue to provide Lisa services on the Snellius infrastructure. Our aim is to migrate most Lisa users to Snellius and provide as much of a similar work environment as possible. So there is no need to look for alternatives.

Will I receive a new password or login for Snellius? 

No. We will just grant you access to one system and rescind access to the Lisa cluster.

How long will data be kept on Lisa? I.e. how long do I have to migrate?

This depends on the specific contract that is in place for your institute or Lisa project, but Lisa data is available until at least three months after migration of an account. Normal procedures for removing user data after an account has expired remain in place (see: this FAQ entry) and users will receive a reminder prior to their data expiring.

I am a VU / UvA user with an unlimited CPU account. Will I Have unlimited budget on Snellius too?

No. On Snellius all budgets are limited. Users on an unlimited fair-share account will get a default computing budget and eventual extra storage as decided by their respective IT departments.

What about users that have both CPU and GPU access to Lisa?

In most cases, users that have both CPU and GPU access on Lisa will have different accounts and usernames for each, because the accounting of CPU and GPU jobs was done differently on Lisa.  As an account on Snellius can have both, GPU and several types of CPU (access to thin, fat and himem nodes) we will consolidate both accounts and users into one. Users with multiple Lisa accounts will get access to all their Lisa data for all their accounts.

Will my existing data on the Lisa be migrated?

Not directly. Users will get a new, empty, home directory on Snellius. Their old Lisa home directories and project spaces will be mounted on a special filesystem as read-only exports. The users are required to copy the data that they need to their Snellius home directories or project spaces. The Lisa data can be found in the directories

/lisa_migration/home/<your_user> and /lisa_migration/project/<your_projectspace>

Will I still be able to Log in to Lisa after the migration?


No. Your login will be enabled for Snellius only, and you will lose SSH access to Lisa. As all your data will be accessible from Snellius, there is no need for that either.

Will my existing jobs in the Lisa queue be migrated?

No, jobs will not be migrated. You have to resubmit those jobs on Snellius.

I have an UvA / VU account: Will I still have unlimited budget on Snellius

No. Both universities will now grant a limited budget. In most cases, we have agreed a standard budget with the IT departments of the universities. In other cases, the users can use this form to request extra resources.

My SSH access to Snellius times out, although I have a valid account and username, why?

Access to Snellius is only allowed from systems or networks of which the IP-address is registered by the Snellius team. When trying to log in from your home, you can either use your university's VPN, which usually is EduVPN or you can use the doornode host, which is universally available. The latter does however not allow data transfers, like, for instance, SFTP or SCP.

As a last resort, please submit a Service Desk ticket, with a request to register your public  IP address. As this requires a change to the firewall settings, the addition of a new IP may take up to two weeks.

In order to know what your public IP address is, you can use the following code on a terminal on Lisa, Snellius or MobaXterm, or just paste the URL into your browser: 

curl http://ipecho.net/plain; echo

Why do I have to manually migrate my data from Lisa to Snellius?

Migrating all user data to Snellius by SURF would be a complex operation, that also would involve a very large peak in I/O operations on Snellius. Because SURF cannot make a selection of relevant files, it would mean that we would have to migrate ALL files. Leaving it to the user, will result in an operation that is more spread out over time, causing less load on both system (which are in full production). This is also a good opportunity for users to clean up files they no longer want to keep, reducing the overall data volume to migrate.

As a GPU user, will I have access to Snellius CPU nodes by default?

Not necessarily. Unlike on Lisa, where all users could access (some) CPU nodes, on Snellius, migrated users may eventually only be able to access the GPU nodes.  We have agreements with some institutes to provide CPU access with a default amount of SBU, together with the GPU. Others only get a GPU-budget by default. Feel free to ask the servicedesk if in doubt.

Why do some GPU partitions not exist on Snellius compared to Lisa?

See the system comparison of Lisa and Snellius below for the naming, usage and access restrictions of Snellius' GPU partitions.