system news

We have a major maintenance to upgrade the Lustre parallel file system (/pfs/nobackup).

One of the goals is to introduce new functionality, for instance project based storage.

We will also do a number of related changes and optimizations to the Lustre file system setup.

We are planning for a full week of complete downtime on all HPC2N systems, including login and thinlinc nodes, starting 2018-06-04 07:30 CEST.

Please make sure to copy any files you want to work with during the downtime to some other system well in advance of the maintenance.

The maintenance window has been moved to March 16th.

On March 16 we will have a maintenance window for upgrading Slurm (the batch system) on both Abisko and Kebnekaise.

We have therefor put a reservation in place on both clusters starting 2018-03-16 08:00.

Jobs will not be allowed to start if their requested runtime reaches beyond that point in time.

So leading up to this maintenance window it is advantageous to submit jobs with smaller runtimes.

We expect to be finished no later than 2018-03-17 17:00.

Due to maintenance, the license servers for Allinea and Matlab will be unavailable for approximately 1/2 hour between 18:00-18:30, 15 February 2018.

TensorFlow 1.5.0 has now been installed on Kebnekaise.

There is both a CPU and a GPU version.

Note that the module has changed name and is now TensorFlow with capital T and F.

We are experiencing some problems with slurm (our batch system) at the moment. The reason for the problem was an upgrade of slurm did not work as well as we hoped.

We are working on the problem at the moment.  This news item will be updated when we have more information.

*Update*

17:50 - Batch system should now work again.

We are currently experiencing problems with the /pfs/nobackup file system.

One of the storage units are misbehaving causing problems when accessing files located on it.

Due to this the batch queues on both Abisko and Kebnekasie have been stopped.

Login may hang for users whos login script (.bashrc) tries to access the /pfs/nobackup filesystem

We currently have no estimate for when the problem will be solved.

* UPDATE: 2018-01-24 20:00 *

The problem has now been solved.

We currently have some problems with cluster login. This affects all users intermittently.

We are working on a solution and will update this news when we have more information.

UPDATE: problem has been solved

During the coming days we will be upgrading the kernel on all systems due to the Meltdown/Spectre security bugs.

This may cause some interference in the normal behaviour of the systems like slow or temporarily missing file system access, stopped queues and similar.

We will try to minimize the user visible effects but this is a upgrade we must do as quickly as possible and may sometimes have to do things in such a way that the user experience is somewhat degraded.

Tuesday 2017-12-19 there will be a maintenance on the cooling system for the room with our cluster storage (/pfs/nobackup).

This means that we have to take that storage down and also the clusters and login nodes.

There is currently a reservation on all nodes of both clusters starting 2017-12-19 07:00 CET.

Any jobs that have a walltime requirement that would extend into that maintenance window will not be allowed to start.

We are having some infrastructure outages and it is not currently possible to log in to the clusters.

We're looking into the problem and will update this news item when more information is available.