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Major research computing systems down during Aug. 5-17 for building upgrades

  • Maintenance

Major ITaP research computing systems will be shut down beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Aug 5, including the Rossmann, Coates, Moffett and Radon clusters. The supercomputers are scheduled to be off until Wednesday, Aug. 17.

An outage to complete power and cooling upgrades at the Mathematical Sciences Building will cut electricity to the building between Aug. 5 and 17. ITaP will bring research systems back on line after power is restored and the MATH data center cools sufficiently following the return to service of the center’s cooling system.

In addition, Purdue Libraries’ catalog, database, electronic journal and other systems located in MATH will be off line from 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, to early Monday, Aug. 8, and from 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12, to sometime Sunday evening, Aug. 14.

The upgrade project is installing two new electrical transformers to handle the additional power and cooling demands of new supercomputers. The project also will provide redundant power and cooling to the data center to help avoid unscheduled outages. An unscheduled outage at the facility can mean millions of hours of lost computing time.

The project is funded by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant to improve Purdue’s main research data center, located in the basement of the Mathematical Sciences Building.

“This project will provide the infrastructure to support up to three additional research clusters, as well as provide additional reliability to current systems housed in this facility,” says John Campbell, associate vice president for academic technologies.

A summary of the impact:

  • Rossmann, Coates, Moffett and Radon clusters off beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Aug 5, until Wednesday, Aug. 17, whenever adequate cooling can be restored.
  • Steele cluster off from 8 a.m. Monday, Aug. 8, to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9, for maintenance on its individual cooling and networking systems.
  • Research computing systems serving the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) project, the Miner cluster supercomputer at Purdue Calumet and Purdue’s DiaGrid distributed computing system off from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 8, for maintenance of their common home directory storage.
  • Fortress archival data storage system accessible the entire time, allowing researchers access to their data during the MATH renovation project.
  • Purdue Libraries’ catalog, database, electronic journal and other systems off from 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, to early Monday, Aug. 8, and from 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12, to an undetermined time Sunday evening, Aug. 14.
  • ITaP student computer lab in Room B10 closed from 6 p.m. Friday, Aug. 5, to 6 a.m. Monday, Aug. 8, and 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 12, to 6 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 14. Non-ITaP office and lab computers in Mathematical Sciences also will be affected Aug. 5-7 and 12-14, along with data center space ITaP operates in MATH for some campus units. Those units have been notified. Department IT staff also are notifying other users who may be impacted by this outage. Purdue email, OnePurdue and other ITaP-managed services are located in different buildings and should function normally. The student computer lab in Stanley Coulter Hall also will be unaffected.

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