ExCL September Meeting 2026

2 minute read

September 2026 ExCL meeting slides.

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Below is a LLM-generated (and reviewed for correctness) summary from the meeting slides.

🚀 ExCL Monthly Update — September 2026

This month’s meeting covered the rollout of interactive-only Slurm access on faraday, hudson, and maxwell, an upcoming DOE-mandated multi-factor authentication requirement for off-site SSH and web access, the retirement of Freshdesk in favor of the ExCL support request form, and new self-service tooling for checking login-node quota usage.

🔒 Policy Changes — High-Utilization Systems

  • ExCL is seeing much higher utilization as the user base grows and more AI-space work is done, leading to resource contention.
  • Following this meeting, faraday, hudson, and maxwell will be restricted to interactive Slurm access only.
    • This enables finer-grained allocation (e.g., by GPU count) and eases off-hour exclusive holds when needed.
    • The pam_slurm_adopt module will limit SSH access to users holding a Slurm allocation on the node, with the SSH session constrained to the allocated resources.
  • See the Slurm section of the ExCL User Docs for updated documentation, including example srun commands:
    • srun -p nvidia --gres gpu:P100:2 --mem 128G -c 16 --pty bash
    • srun -p nvidia -w hudson --exclusive --pty bash
  • See the Primary Usage Notes for guidance on recommended places to run jobs.

🔐 External Login Changes — Multi-Factor Authentication

  • DOE has mandated multi-factor authentication for SSH and web services (e.g., ThinLinc) accessed from outside the ORNL network envelope.
  • Full details aren’t finalized, but the process will look like:
    1. Access login.excl.ornl.gov via SSH.
    2. Receive a QR prompt.
    3. Configure a Google/Microsoft/FreeOTP authenticator using the QR prompt.
    4. Use the authenticator-generated, single-use, time-limited key as your password into ExCL.
  • Full details will be shared via the excl-users mailing list once in place.
  • login-int.excl.ornl.gov will bypass this procedure but is not available from off-site.
  • ExCL is modeling this approach on a similar facility already set up and documented by ITSD.

🎫 excl-help Changes — Freshdesk Retirement

  • ExCL is discontinuing Freshdesk for ticket management as of end of day Thursday, September 17 — the free subscription doesn’t provide enough benefit to justify converting to paid.
  • The primary ticketing channel is now the ExCL Support Request Form, also reachable from www.excl.ornl.gov via the Support Request tab.
    • Requests are emailed to ExCL and tracked in Todoist; all documentation references have been updated.
  • The excl-help@ornl.gov mailing list remains available to reach ExCL staff.
  • No changes to the Slack group — informal contacts are still welcome.

💬 Questions / Projects / Comments / Discussions

  • Checkmk monitoring of cgroup resource limit counters for the login limits?

📌 Summary

September’s meeting centered on tightening access controls as ExCL usage continues to grow: interactive-only Slurm access is coming to faraday, hudson, and maxwell, and a DOE-mandated multi-factor authentication process is on the way for off-site SSH and web access. It also covered the retirement of Freshdesk in favor of the ExCL support request form and Todoist-based tracking, plus the new login-quota-check tool for users to monitor their own login-node resource limits.

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