ECN services outage - ITaP Research Computing systems impacted
Engineering Computing Network (ECN) will be performing staged patching and reboots of all of ECN's RedHat Linux workstations and servers to protect against a serious vulnerability in glibc system library.
A significant number of ECN services will be affected, including several software license servers for ITaP Research Computing systems that are hosted by ECN. License servers are expected to be rebooted around 6:30am EST on Tuesday, March 1st, 2016. Exact duration of the outage is unknown, but it is not expected to be long.
ITaP Research Computing cluster job scheduling is not affected by the outage, but licenses for software like Matlab, Ansys/Fluent, CFD++, Sentaurus, Comsol, Abaqus, PowerFlow, and PowerAcoustics will be unavailable during the outage period, which may lead to license-controlled software refusing to work and jobs exiting with error conditions.
Users of Matlab are encouraged to always submit jobs that explicitly request license tokens available from the job scheduler. These are specified using the gres attribute in your job submission command. For example, to request a single Matlab license:
$ qsub -l nodes=1:ppn=1,walltime=01:00:00,gres=MATLAB+1 myjob.sub
This way the job is guaranteed to only start execution when the necessary license is available. More examples for various Matlab toolboxes are available in the user guides.
Any other jobs using ECN licensed software that start during this downtime will not be able to check out a license and may result in jobs exiting with errors. As well, any software that requires a constant connection to the ECN licensing servers will stop during this time.
Further information regarding affected ECN services may be found in the ECN announcement.
If you are unsure if your software will be affected or have any other concerns please contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.