[Resolved 5/15/20 9:30 PM]
Extensive repairs during our quarterly maintenance period resolved remaining Infiniband issues.
[Update 5/9/20 4:20 PM]
We are continuing to work to resolve remaining issues with connectivity in the Rich datacenter. We have made additional adjustments since this morning, which have improved connectivity and reliability. Read/write access to GPFS (data and scratch) at the normal rate has been restored to nearly all nodes, and the few nodes with remaining difficulties have been offlined, so no new jobs will start on them, although jobs that were already running may hang. However, we continue to see intermittent issues with MPI jobs on active nodes, and we will continue to investigate next week. Please check any running jobs to see if they are producing output or hanging. If they are hanging, please cancel the job. Please resubmit any jobs that have failed, as most non-MPI and MPI jobs should work if resubmitted at this point. Keep in mind that any job with a walltime request that will not complete by 6 AM on Thursday will be held until after the schedule maintenance period.
Thank you for your patience during this emergency repair.
[Update 5/9/20 10:45 AM]
We are continuing to work to resolve remaining issues with connectivity in the Rich datacenter. We have deployed the replacement switch, previously planned for the upcoming maintenance period, and it has been in place since approximately 11:45 PM Friday evening. We are continuing to troubleshoot access to GPFS (data and scratch) and MPI job functionality.
Users who are most affected with long-running jobs have been contacted directly with instructions to check progress of jobs.
Thank you for your patience during this emergency repair.
[Update 5/8/20 11:00 AM]
Our team worked into the early hours of this morning to complete the emergency maintenance, but we have not yet completely resolved all issues. New jobs were released to run around 1:15 AM. We are continuing to isolate and fix errors in the InfiniBand network affecting read/write on GPFS storage (data and scratch) and possibly MPI jobs. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu about any running jobs where you encounter slow performance, which will help us in identifying specific nodes with issues.
Many affected jobs may run more slowly than normal. In order to mitigate loss of research due to these issues, we have administratively added 24 hours to the walltime request of any job currently running. Please note that this extension will not extend job completion times beyond 6:00 AM on Thursday, when our scheduled maintenance period begins. If you resubmit a job, please keep in mind that any job that will not complete by Thursday morning will be held until after scheduled maintenance is complete.
We apologize for the disruption, and we will continue to update you on the status of this repair.
[Update 5/7/20 4:05 PM]
We encountered a complication during the reboot, and our engineers are currently working to complete the repair. We will provide updates as they become available.
[Original message]
We have an emergency need to reboot an InfiniBand switch in the Rich datacenter today, as it is likely to fail shortly without intervention. We will conduct this reboot at 3 PM today, and we expect the outage to last approximately 15 minutes. Any jobs running at 3 PM today are likely to fail if they attempt to read/write files to/from data or scratch directories during the outage or if they are employing MPI. We have stopped all new jobs from beginning in order to reduce the number of affected jobs, and we will release them after the reboot. For any job that is already running, please check the output and resubmit if your job fails. Jobs that do not read/write in the data or scratch directories during the outage window should not be affected.
We have planned a long-term repair to this equipment during next week’s maintenance period, but this emergency reboot is necessary in the meantime.
PACE resources in the Coda datacenter, including Hive and testflight-coda, will not be impacted. CUI/ITAR resources in Rich are also unaffected.