Author: mweiner3

[Update 6/6/22 11:20 AM]

Summary: Revised plans for OIT’s network disaster recovery test remove all expected impact to PACE.

Details: Changes in the disaster recovery test mean that we no longer expect PACE to have any impact this weekend, and all PACE clusters should operate normally, including OnDemand and other PACE services. Campus license servers should also remain reachable from PACE. For additional details about the disaster recovery scope, please see https://oit.gatech.edu/recoveryexercisejun22.

Impact: We have removed the scheduler reservations on all PACE clusters, so longer jobs that have been held can now begin. No impact is expected.

Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions or concerns. 

[Update 5/24/22 10:00 AM]

Summary: Updated information lessens impact to Hive and introduces new partial impact to Firebird during disaster recovery testing (June 10-13).

Details: As additional details about the disaster recovery testing have been clarified, we have determined that Hive can remain in production throughout the testing with limited disruptions, which will also impact Firebird. We will remove the reservation currently in place on Hive for these dates.

Impact:

• Phoenix, PACE-ICE, and COC-ICE will be disabled from 5:00 PM on Friday, June 10, through the morning of Monday, June 13.
• Hive and Firebird will remain in production, but some services will be unavailable for much of the weekend:
  • Hive OnDemand will be unavailable.
  • PACE license servers will be unavailable. Intel compilers will not be usable, so no code can be compiled with Intel compilers, though previously-compiled binaries can be executed.
  • License servers from the College of Engineering, providing access to MATLAB, Ansys, Abaqus, and Comsol for the entire campus, will not be reachable. Any batch or interactive jobs that attempt to check out a license for these applications will fail. Researchers are encouraged to avoid such jobs just before the outage and to wait until it is complete before submitting them.
  • A number of PACE utilities, such as pace-quota and pace-check-queue, will not function.
  • Other intermittent disruptions are possible.
• Buzzard will not be impacted.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this campus network testing. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions or concerns. 

 

[Original announcement 4/27/22 11:45 AM]

Summary: Campus network disaster recovery testing will disable Phoenix, Hive, PACE-ICE, and COC-ICE from 5:00 PM on Friday, June 10, through 12:00 noon on Monday, June 13.  

Details: In accordance with USG security requirements, OIT will be conducting disaster recovery testing on the Georgia Tech campus network during the weekend of June 11, which will close access to most of PACE’s clusters as well as some other campus resources.  PACE’s Phoenix, Hive, PACE-ICE, and COC-ICE clusters will be impacted. Firebird and Buzzard will remain in production.  

Impact: PACE will set a reservation to prevent any jobs from running during the downtime. You will not be able to log in, access your data, nor run jobs during the outage.  

Longer jobs will be held until the testing is complete if their walltime request will not lead the job to conclude before the outage, just as they are during quarterly maintenance periods. Researchers who run long jobs should note the duration between PACE’s May maintenance period (May 11-13) and the testing period, beginning June 10. In particular, Hive researchers who submit 30-day jobs to the hive-nvme, hive-sas, or hive-nvme-sas queues should note that any 30-day job submitted after April 12 will not begin until at least June 13. Researchers are encouraged to submit jobs with reduced walltimes whenever feasible to make use of the cluster between maintenance and disaster recovery testing.  

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this campus network testing. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions or concerns. 

Summary: The Phoenix scheduler became nonresponsive overnight and was restored at approximately 9:00 AM today.

Details: Last night, the Phoenix scheduler became nonresponsive, likely shortly after midnight. The PACE team restarted the scheduler and restored its function just before 9:00 this morning.

Impact: Commands such as “qsub” and “qstat” would not have worked, so new jobs could not be submitted early this morning. Running jobs were not interrupted.

Thank you for your patience early this morning. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions.

Summary: Hive project & scratch storage cable replacement and potential for an outage

Details: A cable connecting the Hive GPFS device, hosting project (data) and scratch storage, to one of its controllers needs to be replaced, beginning around 10:00 AM Tuesday (April 12).

Impact: Since there is a redundant controller, no impact is expected. However, a similar previous replacement caused storage to become unavailable, so this is a possibility. If the redundant controller fails, your job may fail or run without making progress. If you have such a job, please cancel it and resubmit it once storage availability is restored. PACE will monitor Hive GPFS storage throughout this procedure. In the event of a loss of availability occurs, we will update you.

If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

[Update 4/4/22 12:25 PM]

Summary: [Resolved] Free tier charge account balances did not reset on April 1. A manual reset was performed on April 4.

Details: The deleted Perl library that prevented job submissions last Thursday night and Friday morning also caused an error in the monthly reset of free tier charge account balances at midnight on Friday, April 1. Other accounts that reset on a monthly basis were not impacted. PACE manually reset all free tier account balances just before noon today.

Impact: Job submissions to free tier accounts over the last three days would have succeeded only if sufficient leftover balance from March remained. At this time, all free tier accounts have been reset to their full monthly allocation, and jobs run prior to the reset will not count towards April utilization. All faculty and their teams now have access to their full April free tier allocation. Researchers can run the “pace-quota” command to view their available charge accounts and balances.

We apologize for any disruption this may have caused. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions.

[Original Message 4/1/22 8:49 AM]

Summary: [Resolved] Phoenix users attempting to submit jobs have received an error message that they are not authorized for their charge account.

Details: Beginning yesterday evening, Phoenix users attempting to submit jobs have at times received an error message indicating that they are not authorized for charge accounts to which they should have access. PACE deployed a temporary repair at 6:45 PM yesterday. The issue recurred at midnight, and the temporary repair was again made at 8:15 AM today. We have now identified the root cause as a deleted Perl library on the scheduler and deployed a permanent fix.

Impact: At this time, researchers are again able to submit jobs. Please resubmit any rejected jobs with the usual charge account. Researchers can run the “pace-quota” command to view their available charge accounts and balances. No running jobs were impacted.

We apologize for this disruption. Please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any questions.

 

 

PACE is nearing the conclusion of our user records and data audit, and we would like to share with you several updates to how PACE handles data stored on our storage systems and the role of schools in managing that data.

PACE takes responsibility for the storage of all data from our old systems in the Rich datacenter that has not been assigned to a current member of the faculty. All of this data has been inaccessible to all users since December 1, 2020. Any school that wishes to do so may request data of a former faculty member and thereby assume responsibility for the data and for the cost of continuing to store it on PACE (unless it is relocated), in accordance with the Data Retention Guidelines provided by the GT administration and shared with you at this time. If the school does not make such a request, PACE will cover the cost of storing this data until July 2024, then delete anything that has not been requested.

All data left on PACE by faculty who departed the Institute after July 1, 2021, will follow the Data Retention Guidelines. Under these guidelines, the faculty member’s former school will be responsible for the data and the cost of storing it on PACE, relocating it to another storage system, or determining it can be deleted while complying with any relevant regulations and contracts. The 1 TB provided to each school at no charge on Phoenix may be used to store these files. Schools also have the option of purchasing PACE Archive storage, which is designed for long-term retention of data that does not need to be used regularly on PACE compute clusters.

If you have any questions about PACE storage, please contact PACE at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu, and we’ll be happy to discuss it with you.

[Update 3/1/22 6:40 PM]

The Phoenix scheduler is restored after the PACE team rebooted the server hosting the Moab workload manager. Thank you for your patience while we performed this repair. If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

[Original Post 3/1/22 5:20 PM]

Summary: Phoenix scheduler outage prevents new jobs from starting

What’s happening and what are we doing: The Phoenix scheduler is currently experiencing an outage as the server hosting the Moab workload manager is unavailable. The PACE team is actively investigating and working to bring the scheduler back in service.

How does this impact me: New jobs on Phoenix will not be able to start. While you can submit jobs, they will remain in the queue until service is restored. Running jobs should not be impacted and will continue to run. You may find that Moab commands, including “showq” and others, are not responsive.

What we will continue to do: PACE will continue working to restore functionality to the Phoenix scheduler. We will provide updates as they are available.

Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience that this temporary limitation may cause you. If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Summary: Battery replacement on Phoenix project & scratch storage will impact performance on Thursday, March 3.

What’s happening and what are we doing: Power supply units on the Phoenix Lustre storage device, holding project and scratch storage, need to be replaced. During the replacement, which will begin at approximately 10 AM on Thursday, March 3, storage will shift to write-through mode, and performance will be impacted. Once the UPS batteries in the new units are sufficiently charged, performance will return to normal.

How does this impact me: Phoenix project and scratch performance will be impacted until the fresh batteries have sufficiently charged, which should take several hours. Jobs may progress more slowly than normal. If your job runs out of wall time and is cancelled by the scheduler, please resubmit it to run again.

What we will continue to do: PACE will monitor Phoenix storage throughout this procedure.

Thank you for your patience as we complete this replacement. If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.