Scheduled Maintenance - RCAC home directory upgrades
Update - 7:00pm, 1/4/2013: - All community clusters (Steele, Coates, Rossmann, Hansen, Carter, and Peregrine1) are back in production.
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Radon is currently not in production, as ITaP engineers are addressing issues encountered during the upgrade.
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The Condor Pool is operating at reduced capacity.
During the New Years' weekend holiday, all ITaP HPC resources will be unavailable due to a scheduled upgrade of research home directories.
During this downtime, systems will also receive OS updates, network updates, upgrades to the PBS batch system software, and updates to the software stack.
WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF THIS UPGRADE?
From 8:00am, Saturday December 29 through 5pm on January 4, 2013, all research clusters will be unavailable for login or running jobs. This includes the Condor pool, Radon, Moffett, Peregrine 1, Steele, Coates, Rossmann, Hansen, and Carter.
Additionally, any PBS jobs which request a walltime which would take them past the starting maintenance dates will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.
Access to the Fortress archive system will not be interrupted.
WHY ARE HOME DIRECTORIES BEING MOVED?
After 5 years of service, the NAS system currently providing research home directories is being retired. Beginning January 3, 2013, ITaP research computing home directories will leverage the new Extensible Storage Facility hardware deployed for the new Boiler Backpack service [^1][^2].
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF THE NEW HOME DIRECTORY SERVICE?
This upgrade will provide a number of benefits to research customers:
- Home directories will no longer have a limit on the number of files.
- Users will be able to use a self-service tool to select the allocation of their 100 GB of Boiler Backpack storage between CIFS, cloud storage, and Research homes.- For example, you may opt to allocate 50G to home directories, 25G to CIFS, and 25G to cloud storage, or any other combination.
- More information on this self-service capability will be provided in future announcements.
While we regret the need for days without the clusters being available, we are excited about the new research capabilities that this new service will provide going forward.
Please send any questions or concerns about this upgrade to rcac-help@purdue.edu.