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Alvis data migration

Last update: 2026-05-10

This document is to help you with the upcoming move to Arrhenius.

Alvis will start migrating users and data to Arrhenius in June, when all users should have gotten their Arrhenius accounts. Alvis compute nodes will decrease after 2026-06-30, until 2026-08-30 when all hardware will be turned off.

Migrating your project storage will take significant time. Data migrating can take days to over a week if you have many files in your project storage.

Arrhenius GPU run ARM

Arrhenius GPU partition runs on Grace Hopper nodes https://www.naiss.se/resource/arrhenius/.

This means any software build for x86 CPUs (everything from Intel and AMD) will not work. There is no point to migrating software installations.

Smaller storage

With the move to Arrhenius, you should expect a significant reduction in storage allocations overall. There will also be a file quota, which will initially start of as generous soft quota.

Start cleaning today

You can help yourself already today by cleaning out storage areas as much as possible. This not only will help you reach any new allocation limits, but may also massively speed up the time to sync the data from Alvis at Chalmers to Arrhenius in Linköping.

In particular, number of files is a big concern and can cause syncing data to take weeks.

  1. Old checkpoints, logs etc.
  2. Datasets that are easy to download again, and are not actively used today.
  3. Software installations (including Python and Conda environments). These will not work on Arrhenius anyway.
  4. Containers, you need to rebuild or re-download these on Arrhenius.

Helping you migrate data

We are looking at how to help user migrate data and map user IDs on the new system, but such data migration will still take a long time due to the sheer number of files. If you reduce your usage (especially number of files), syncing will be faster. We will detect and exclude any directory containing a pyenv.cfg file or a conda-meta directory from the sync. Normally, such directories indicate it is a software environment and you should never save data inside those.

Exact details on how to select a migration date.