Holland Computing Center Updates

Maintenance Downtime Update

2024-02-02T17:11:15.517Z

All HCC resources at our PKI datacenter including Swan, Anvil, Attic, and Globus are now available for use. Users with Anvil VMs will need to power those on via the anvil.unl.edu web interface.

The final part of the power infrastructure upgrades to our PKI datacenter will require one additional full datacenter downtime in the coming weeks. Details on exact time and duration will be provided as soon as possible.

Crane: Returned to Service

2021-04-13T22:11:06.404Z

The Crane resource is available for use once again after a much needed downtime to upgrade the base operating system to CentOS 8. If you encounter any issues or have any questions please contact us at [email protected]. The main methods in which users interact with Crane, including but not limited to Shell access, Open OnDemand, and Globus are all still available. While we also attempted to keep as much of the available software as possible, there may be certain modules which are no longer available due to their age and incompatibility with modern Linux. Especially for MPI-based software, HCC recommends verifying the appropriate modules are present before launching your production jobs. Similar to Rhino, a reasonably modern set of default modules is now also provided.

The SLURM queue of jobs was not maintained during this upgrade to limit unexpected side effects, and you will need to resubmit any work you previously had in queue when the downtime began.

After an upgrade of this scale, there will likely be some latent issues that crop up due to the complexity of the changes. Please email [email protected] with any problems or questions you may have, and we will work to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Crane: Downtime Update

2021-04-12T22:34:12.298Z

While there was intent to have Crane available for general use no later than today (Monday April 12th) some unfortunate hardware failures over the weekend and this morning have made it necessary to postpone opening Crane until tomorrow morning (Tuesday April 13th). One of the failures today involved Crane's /work filesystem, and out of an abundance of caution we are letting the affected components rebuild to completion before allowing access. This process will hopefully finish overnight, and allow us to open Crane in a healthy state tomorrow. No data on /work was affected by the earlier failure, so all your files on /work should remain.

We will send an announcement as soon as Crane is open for general use, including details about changes made during this downtime and how they may impact your use of the system.

Crane: Extended Downtime Announcement

2021-03-24T20:14:42.846Z

The CRANE cluster will undergo an extended downtime beginning April 5th. This downtime will be used to upgrade the operating system used on the cluster from an EL6 base to an EL8 base. While it has served us well for over half a decade, the current operating system has reached the end of its supported lifecycle and will no longer receive security updates necessitating this change. Additionally, it is increasingly challenging to support modern research software and codes on an aging platform as more and more of those codes expect or require more modern operating systems. While we understand this may be inconvenient to some, this move is necessary for us to continue supporting the evolving research needs of the University system. This downtime will require at least three days to complete but may require more. Updates will be provided when the system is back online.

During this downtime, the Rhino, Anvil, Attic, and Common (accessible via Rhino) resources will remain available. The servers backing Crane's /work and /home filesystems will be upgraded during this time and will not be accessible even upon special request. If you think you will need access to data on these filesystems during the downtime you will need to copy that data elsewhere prior to the downtime start. Data on Crane's /work and /home filesystems will not be removed during this upgrade. As a reminder, while /home is replicated and backed up, the /work filesystem is intended to serve as a temporary scratch filesystem and has no backups. We don't anticipate any data loss on /work but as always important data on /work should be backed up prior to this scheduled downtime.

Any questions about this upcoming downtime should be directed to [email protected].