Greetings PACE community,
As hurricane Irma makes its way along the projected path through Florida and into Georgia, I’d like to let you know what PACE is doing to prepare.
OIT Operations will be closely monitoring the path of the storm and any impacts it might have on the functionality of computer rooms in the Rich Computer Center and our backup facility on Marietta Street. In the event that either of these facilities were to loose power, they will enact emergency procedures and react as best as possible.
What does this mean for PACE?
The room where we keep the compute nodes only has a few minutes of battery protected power. While this is plenty to ride through any momentary glitches in power, it only lasts a few minutes. In the event of a power loss, compute nodes will power down and terminate whatever jobs are running. The rooms where we keep our servers, storage and backups have additional generator power which can keep them running longer. This too is a finite resource. In the event of power loss, PACE will begin orderly shutdown of servers and storage in order to reduce the chance of data corruption or loss.
Bottom line is that our priority will be to protect the critical research data, and enable successful resumption of research once power is restored.
Where to get further updates?
Our primary communications channels remain our mailing list, pace-availability@lists.gatech.edu, and the PACE blog (https://blog.pace.gatech.edu). However, substantial portions of the IT infrastructure required for these to operate are also located in campus data centers. Additionally, OIT employs a cloud-based service to publish status updates. In the event that our blog is unreachable, please visit https://status.gatech.edu.