UCF ARCC Maintenance Outage: Monday, August 16 through Sunday, August 22, 2021

Stokes and Newton will be taken down per our bi-annual routine maintenance cycle near the end of Summer term. Specifically, the clusters will be unavailable from Monday, August 16 through Sunday, August 22

The primary objectives during this downtime is to complete some re-wiring we need to do, install some new support equipment, and update some software and data on the clusters.

Recall that we now routinely bring the system down twice a year, once in late Fall and once in late Spring/Summer. We will keep the users notified in advance of such downtimes, but we recommend you build such expectations into your workflow. Though we anticipate no data loss during this time, it's never a bad idea to backup your materials. So we suggest you use this opportunity to copy salient data and code off of Stokes and Newton prior to the downtime.

SLURM Jobs marked as “Requested Node not available, Reserved for maintenance”?

In preparation for the maintenance windows, the ARCC staff place a reservation on compute nodes starting at the beginning of the maintenance window. This ensures that jobs are not running when the staff need to begin the work to shut down the cluster. If you submit a job requesting more time than there is between the time the job is submitted and when the reservation begins, your job will stay in the queue with the status Requested Node not available, Reserved for maintenance. Jobs in this state will not start until after the maintenance window. If you believe your job can finish before the maintenance window, cancel the job and resubmit with a shorter time request. As with all resource requests, providing reasonable estimates to SLURM for run time will ensure the most efficient operation of the cluster.