[Snic-users] Triolith and Gamma unavailable for 1-4 hours on Thursday, December 8th

[Mats Kronberg]

Dear NSC users,

On December 8th, Triolith and Gamma will be shut down for a short time.

Start of downtime: 2016-12-08 08:30 CET
Estimated duration of downtime: 1-4h

Why: During this stop NSC will perform hardware maintenance. Due to
unfortunate design choices by the storage system vendor, some cables
(one of which is broken) are very difficult or impossible to replace
while the system is running. Rather than risking an unplanned outage
(which would require all users with running jobs to investigate,
cleanup and resubmit failed jobs) we will perform this maintenance
while no jobs are running.

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact support at nsc.liu.se.


Details
-------

All login nodes (including ThinLinc) and compute nodes will be
unavailable during this time, and might be restarted during the stop.

Queued jobs will only start if the time limit requested (i.e "sbatch
-t DD-HH:MM:SS") is less than the time remaining before the start of
the downtime.

If you need to run jobs in the week before the downtime, you might
need to shorten your jobs.

Jobs that are in the queue before the downtime will remain in the
queue, and will be started normally after the downtime.


Opportunities
-------------

If your project has a low priority due to having run a lot recently,
you might find it much easier than usual to get short jobs started in
the days immediately before downtime as they don't have to compete
with longer jobs. However, please note that core hours used for such
jobs will still be counted, so your priority will be even less after
the downtime if you take advantage of this.


-- 
Mats Kronberg, NSC Support <support at nsc.liu.se>