Dear PACE users,
It is again time for our quarterly maintenance. Starting at 6:00am Thursday, October 13, all resources managed by PACE will be taken offline. Maintenance is scheduled to continue through Saturday evening. Our next maintenance period is scheduled for January 19-21, 2017.
As previously posted, our major activity this time around will be an upgrade of all compute nodes, head nodes and interactive nodes from RedHat 6.5 to RedHat 6.7. This is simply deploying the operating system and software repository we been testing internally and have made available on the TestFlight cluster for the broader PACE community to perform testing as well. I’ll issue one more plea for additional testing to the user community and ask that you report experiences, either positive or negative, to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
DDN/GPFS work
We have some hardware repairs to perform on both DDN devices. Internal redundancy has prevented any availability or integrity problems so we’ll take advantage of the downtime for DDN engineers to make repairs. No user action is expected.
Networking
The OIT Network Engineering team will be upgrading the software running on a number of PACE network devices. These updates are for stability and have been running on similar devices in the campus network for some time. No user action is expected.
Electrical work
OIT Operations will be replacing some faulty rack-level power distribution in a couple of racks. No user action is expected.
Bonus objectives
If sufficient time remains in the maintenance period, we will add capacity to both the GPFS scratch and project systems. We are able to perform these activities during normal operations, so we will prioritize bringing things back into operation as soon as possible.