UoM Spartan HPC Service Scheduled Maintenance: 16-19 December 2018

A scheduled maintenance affecting the University of Melbourne Spartan HPC service.

START TIME: 2018-12-16 09:00 A.M. AEDT
END TIME: 2018-12-19 09:00 A.M. AEDT

REASONS

A large proportion of the UoM Research Cloud infrastructure is currently connected to a legacy Cisco network environment. This network is at capacity and does not allow us to improve performance further nor deploy more cloud capacity, including the 4000 cores we recently purchased. In response, we have built a new high-performance research network and therefore require a scheduled two-day outage of UoM Research Cloud to do the following:

- Network switch upgrades 
- Migrate UoM cloud compute and storage to new high-performance research network

DETAIL

Beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, 2018-12-16 until 1:00 p.m. Sunday, 2018-12-16, access to the Spartan login node will be affected intermittently while University Services undertakes vital network maintenance work on the datacentre network. Jobs will continue to run during this window but logins and file transfers may fail for short periods. After 1:00 p.m. Sunday, 2018-12-16, access to the login node will be fully restored.

Further to this network maintenance, beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, 2018-12-17 until 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, 2018-12-19, the cloud and longcloud partitions will be offline due to maintenance on the University of Melbourne Research Cloud. The Research Cloud needs to undertake this maintenance because a large proportion of the UoM Research Cloud infrastructure is currently connected to a legacy Cisco network environment. This network is at capacity and this upgrade will allow us to deploy additional resources and increase performance and reliability.

By 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, 2018-12-19, all spartan-rc cloud compute nodes will be resumed.

Other parts of Spartan HPC Service will not be affected during this scheduled outage.

SUPPORT

If you require help regarding this scheduled maintenance, please contact us via hpc-support@unimelb.edu.au or call (+61 3) 834 40999 and ask for Spartan HPC support.

The University of Melbourne Spartan HPC Support Team