system news

The /pfs/nobackup file system is now back online.

Some files and directories may have been lost.
We have sent a mail to users we know are affected.

Please let us know if you find missing files or directories.

There is however no way to retrieve any lost data.

We are  sorry about this and we are working with the vendor to reduce the possibility of it happening again.

There is currently (2015-03-23 15:11) an outage of the PFS filesystem, rendering it read-only on all HPC2N resources.

Batch queues have been suspended until the problem is resolved.

Update 2015-03-23 16:13:
The problem seems complex and it is unlikely that it will be resolved today.

Update 2015-03-24 18:13:
We believe the problem has been resolved. PFS is again accessible and batch queues have been resumed.

*Update 2015-03-24 19:30*
The file system went back to being mounted read-only. The problem is still there...

We where experiencing problems with pfs on Akka and Abisko during Friday 13th.

*UPDATE 2015-03-13 20:10 /pfs/nobackup is now back in production*

Fri, 2015-03-13 17:30 | Birgitte Brydsö

There is a problem with the /pfs/nobackup file system as mounted on the login nodes and compute nodes, all accesses to it will hang.

If you currently touch that filesystem in your .bashrc or other login scripts, it's likely that your login attempt will appear to be hung.

*UPDATE 2015-02-28 11:15*
The problem has been reported to the vendor and we are waiting for them to get back to us
Batch queus has been stopped so no more jobs will be affected.

*UPDATE 2015-03-01 12:45*
The problem has been fixed, so jobs and PFS should once again be operational.

The login node of Akka is experiencing severe disk problems.

The disk will be replaced first thing on Monday (23/2) morning and the node reinstalled.

Until then it will be kept offlline.

This does not in any way affect running or queued jobs.

Any data can of course be picked up by logging in to Abisko.

*UPDATE 2015-02-23 07:00*
The login node of Akka is now back online

Sun, 2015-02-22 17:27 | Åke Sandgren

The Abisko login node had crashed and has been rebooted. Access should be restored.

Fri, 2015-01-30 18:00 | Birgitte Brydsö

Due to an unexpected internal change in the last kernel update, both AFS (serving your normal home directory) and Lustre (serving /pfs/nobackup) stopped working.

We have therefor blocked all queues to make sure no more nodes reboot into the problematic kernel.

The problem does not affect running jobs.

We will remove this kernel and resume operation as soon as possible...

*UPDATE 2015-02-04 11:35 CET*
Both systems are now back in normal production.

The /pfs/nobackup file system is currently suffering from a misconfiguration.

The file system was created with fewer inodes than intended and we are in short supply at the moment.

This makes creation of files or directories to fail when we run out of inodes and thus may cause jobs to fail.

At the time of writing (2015-01-12 16:18 CET) we have ~4 million inodes available so the problem is not immediate but depending on what jobs are currently in the queue this could change quickly.

The batch master server for Abisko needs hardware maintenance and the /pfs/nobackup file system needs a reconfiguration.

We will begin this on Wednesday Jan 21th, starting at 08:00 CET. Unfurtunately the /pfs/nobackup maintenace took longer than expected, so we're still working on this on Thursday Jan 22.

A reservation has been put inplace on the batch systems which means that jobs will not be started unless they are short enough to finish before that time.

The login nodes of both clusters will also be disabled.

During the Christmas holidays we are running with reduced staffing.

We will try to solve any arising problems as quickly as possible, but there will be delays due to this.

We will be back at full capacity on Jan 7th.

HPC2N staff whish You all a