Purdue University

Beginning at 5:00 pm, Friday, August 5th, the Coates and Rossmann supercomputer clusters will be unavailable due to work to complete a power and cooling upgrade to the Math Sciences building datacenter. We estimate that these clusters will be unavailable for use until approximately Wednesday, August 17. Also affected are the Radon cluster and the Moffett SiCortex system.

While the Steele cluster is undergoing separate maintenance on August 8-9, it is largely not affected by this work.

Only those PBS jobs with walltimes short enough that they will complete prior to 5pm Friday, August 5, will be scheduled for execution -- jobs with longer walltimes will be held in the queue until the systems have been returned to production after the maintenance on August 17th.

The upgrade project will install two new electrical transformers and a secondary cooling loop to handle the additional power and cooling demands of new supercomputers, as well as provide redundant power to the datacenter to help avoid unscheduled outages. An unscheduled loss of power to the facility can mean millions of hours of lost computing time.

While this work will unfortunately impact on the use of Coates and Rossmann in the near term, it does include a great deal of facilities work that will allow ITaP to better serve existing and future community cluster partners. A brief summary of the work being performed includes:

• Work that will enable ITaP to install up to three additional clusters into the Math Sciences building, and provide redundancy to the data center
• Installation of two new redundant transformers
• Installation of a larger capacity chilled water feed to the data center.
• Installation of a secondary cooling loop that will allow the datacenter to continue operation in the event of a disruption to the campus chilled water service

The work will involve

• Two full-building power shutdowns, over the weekends of both August 6-7 and August 13-14
• Removal and replacement of old electrical gear to improve the reliability of the existing electrical feeds into MATH.
• Disconnecting all air conditioners and cooling distribution units (CDUs) from old plumbing and reconnect to new cooling loop.
• Reconnecting all data center electrical service to the new transformers.
  The project is funded by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant to upgrade and improve Purdue’s main research datacenter, located in the basement of the Mathematical Sciences Building.