ARC users should be aware that ARC systems will be offline for a portion of March 7-11, 2022. 

Summary:

  •  Cascades/Dragonstooth/Huckleberry outage: Monday, March 7th 8:00AM -- 1:00PM
  •  Tinkercliffs/Infer outage: Monday, March 7th 8:00AM -- Thursday, March 10th 5:00PM
  •  Spring Break will mark the beginning of a shift in storage paradigms at ARC

Details:

The older systems (Cascades, Dragonsooth, and Huckleberry clusters) will be unavailable starting at 8:00am on Monday, March 7th while critical updates are applied to the storage system which serves HOME directories for all users. We expect to have them restored to service by Monday afternoon.

The Tinkercliffs and Infer clusters rely on the same system for HOME directories and will also be offline starting at 8:00am on Monday, March 7th. Further downtime is required for these systems as we bring online a new storage system to serve PROJECTS directories (eg. /projects/myproj) and synchronize data from the existing system to the new one. This work is expected to take multiple days and the systems should be back online by Thursday, March 10th at 5:00pm. This outage interval will also be used to perform other back-end work to these clusters and the supporting infrastructure as we prepare for the arrival of new equipment.

There is a continual trend in high performance computing towards ever larger datasets and more demanding I/O requirements. As the new PROJECTS storage system comes online, ARC will begin a storage policy transition to align storage options with systems that are effective at serving the needs. Most notably, we will be retiring the WORK storage target on Tinkercliffs and Infer and begin promoting the use of actual scratch filesystems which are already available instead. These filesystems are much more capable of handling the demanding I/O workloads, but need to seen as very temporary storage units which are subject to regular cleanup/deletions.  We will be providing followup information on storage policies along with documentation on our website to help guide you through the processes of migrating data and rethinking workflows.

Documentation site: https://docs.arc.vt.edu

Helpdesk Tickets: https://www.arc.vt.edu/help

Zoom Office Hours Calendar: https://arc.vt.edu/office-hours/