ARCC Shutting down for Dorian

Details

Written by R. Paul Wiegand R. Paul Wiegand

Published: 29 August 2019 29 August 2019

• outage

Stokes and Newton will be shutdown this SATURDAY in advance of hurricane Dorian. Please plan accordingly and stay safe.

Addendum: Our clusters are DOWN for the duration of the storm. We will keep you posted.

Changes due to Spring 2019 Maintenance Downtime

Details

Written by R. Paul Wiegand R. Paul Wiegand

Published: 10 May 2019 10 May 2019

• downtime
• maintenance

Stokes and Newton have returned to operation two days early! Please remember that we have two such scheduled maintenance downtimes per year, one after Fall term and one after Spring term (the one we just completed).

Please take a moment to read over the changes, most of which will not affect usage:

1. We increased the default inode count for user accounts from 400K files to 1 million files.
2. We upgraded our NVIDIA GPU drivers to the latest versions and made the CUDA 10.1 module available to users.
3. We repaired a minor problem that was preventing SLURM from sending email about jobs when configured to do so.
4. We revised our naming standards for ARCC email addresses so that they were more general and more consistent with our other standards. The most relevant change that affects users is as follows. For the new address, check you email or go here. The old email address will redirect to this address for some time in the future; however, users should transition to the new address.
5. Some minor configuration changes and testing were performed on our NFS server to address some performance issues. This is not the shared file system where user data resides, but is instead the file system where the modules and applications are stored. The system benchmarks acceptably now.
6. We completed our regular benchmarking of the compute, file system, and network performance. All show the clusters operating as expected.
7. A review of our anaconda installs indicated a number of errors. We have temporarily *removed* anaconda from our applications and modules list while we reconstruct these applications. This means that our JupyterHub gateways are also temporarily down. These will all be re-deployed soon.

We appreciate your patience and wish you the best with your research!

Paul & Glenn.

Spring Maintenance cycle downtime, May 6 - May 12

Details

Written by R. Paul Wiegand R. Paul Wiegand

Published: 11 April 2019 11 April 2019

• downtime
• maintenance

Stokes and Newton will be taken down per our bi-annual routine maintenance cycle during early May. Specifically, the clusters will be unavailable from the morning of Monday, May 6 through the evening of Sunday, May 12.

Recall that we now routinely bring the system down twice a year, once in late Fall and once in late Spring. 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.