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End of Life (EOL) for Sun SPARC V880
Hardware and Solaris Support
February 14, 2008
The Center for Research Computing (CRC) announces that the end-of-life (EOL) for operation of it's Sun SPARC V880 hardware will be May 31st 2008. This EOL includes the SPARC based "front-end" machine stats.hpcc.nd.edu and the compute nodes sun9-sun13. Coinciding with the EOL of this hardware - the CRC would also like to announce the EOL of support for the Solaris 10 environment - and all versions of Solaris.
The end-of-life of the V880 SPARC equipment is due to a significant drop in usage, aging hardware (5 years old), lack of applications requiring Solaris, and significant system administration burden for a relatively small number of machines.
Over the past few months the CRC staff has contacted the few users still using the SPARC hardware and their applications (mostly IMSL libraries) have been successfully moved to Linux. We believe that the impact on the CRC user community will be minimal with the removal of this SPARC equipment. The CRC Opteron processors running Linux are roughly twice the speed of the SPARC processors and a number have significantly more memory. We know of no applications currently in use that requires the SPARC architecture. CRC staff will continue to assist users with migration of applications and data - If you have additional questions regarding this EOL please email us at CRCsupport@nd.edu