[May 3, 2019 – 4:53pm] On May 7, 2019, from 8:00pm (EST)- 9:00pm (EST), GT IT will be conducting maintenance of our VPN service.  During this period, users that are connected to our ITAR/ASDL/CUI  clusters via the VPN (pace.vpn.gatech.edu) will be disconnected.  This interruption will be brief (about 5 minutes), then you may  reconnect to the VPN and then the cluster.  This service maintenance will not impact any of the running batch jobs, but it may impact running interactive jobs during this period.  For additional details on the maintenance taking place, please visit the following link.

Thank you for your attention to this maintenance that GT IT is conducting.

PACE Staff have completed our move to the CODA building and are settling in. We’ve also added a couple of new faces to the team, announcements will be forthcoming shortly.

As the year-end purchasing deadlines approach, we wanted to update the community on some changes to our procurement calendar. We’re doing our best to advocate for the research community and navigate some tough realities. We’ve nearly exhausted our space in the Rich Computer Center, and are very limited in our ability to deploy new equipment in that space. The CODA datacenter will be our new home (more on that below) but is not quite ready yet.

As such, we have cancelled the previously planned FY19-Phase3 and will need to shift some dates for our last order in FY19, FY19-Phase4. This shift results in FY19-Phase4 and FY20-Phase1 essentially being deployed concurrently around October of 2019. For this reason, we strongly encourage faculty to participate in FY20-Phase1 and reserve FY19-Phase4 for those who need to use funds expiring in FY19.

We will also adjust configurations and pricing for FY19-Phase4 and FY20-Phase1 based on upcoming processing technology and market conditions once that pricing is available to the public.

Finally, planning is in progress for PACE to migrate existing research cyberinfrastructure from the Rich data center to CODA, and all efforts will be made to minimize disruption to research efforts during this move. The execution phase will not begin until at least October 2019.

To view the published schedule online or for more information, visit https://pace.gatech.edu/participation or email pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best Regards,

-PACE Team

[March 7, 2018 – 12:33pm]  We completed migrating our virtual servers, and restored access to the testflight and novazohar clusters.  If you should encounter any issues, please let us know at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

Tasks completed:

Complete – Migrate two license servers

Complete – Migrate testflight headnode

Complete – Migrate novazohar headnode

Complete – Migrate testflight scheduler

[March 6, 2018 – 10:44am] PACE will be migrating two license servers, testflight headnode, testflight scheduler, and novazohar headnode.  This migration will be very brief that will take as long as rebooting the systems.  We are reserving 30 minutes for this service on Thursday, March 7 at 12:00pm.  This will impact you very briefly that will include inability to connect to the designated login/headnodes (i.e., novazohar, and testflight) as well as possible inability to submit jobs in which applications require a license.   This service should not impact any running jobs.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Office of Information Technology reported intermittent network latency impacting parts of the campus network.  This would present as occasional slowness and timeouts when accessing PACE managed resources and access from PACE to non-PACE license servers, etc.  This may have caused new jobs to fail during attempts to check out software license that are not managed by PACE.  OIT has installed additional capacity, isolated and neutralized part of the cause of the issue, which is currently being monitored for any further network traffic issues.

For details and updates to this incident, please refer to OIT’s status page detailing this incident.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

[March 20, 2019] This is a friendly note to confirm that PACE staff has moved over to Coda building.  While we have moved out of Rich Building, we continue to monitor the Rich data center as we have in the past.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

[Original Post – March 4, 2019]As you may already know, PACE Team will be moving to CODA during the weeks of March 11 and March 18, more specifically, our offices will be in transition on March 15 and March 18. Please note, this move is only for the staff members and not the data center. Data center will continue to operate as usual, but our team’s responses may be delayed during this period, especially on March 15 and 18.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

At about 2:30pm, during a routine storage server procedure, we experienced a problem that was related to a service not starting properly. We have resolved the issue within 15 minutes. This incident caused temporary unavailability of some applications and home directories. The symptoms include hanging commands, codes, and login attempts.

We believe most jobs have resumed operation after the issue is resolved, but we can’t be sure. Please check your jobs to identify if there are any crashed jobs and report any problems you may notice to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

Thank you for your attention, and apologies for this inconvenience.

[Original Post – February 18, 2019] On Sunday, Feb. 24, OIT will perform a series of data center upgrades and migrations. This service window includes intermittent delays or disruption to major campus IT services between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. as well as occasional interruptions in wireless connectivity between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m.

During this service upgrade, the intermittent service interruptions will result in periods when users may not be able to connect to PACE managed resources or they may be disconnected from their sessions, which may  interrupt interactive jobs that rely on an active SSH connection to a given cluster.   However, these upgrades will not impact running or queued batch jobs.  OIT anticipates all the service upgrades and migrations to conclude by 8 p.m., and PACE users should resume their work as usual.

For additional information and details on the services that OIT will be upgrading and migrating, please refer to the status page link at https://status.gatech.edu

Compute
* (COMPLETE) Vendor will replace defective components on groups of servers
Network

Storage
* (COMPLETE) GPFS / DDN enclosure reset

Other
• (COMPLETE) PACE VMWare reconfiguration to remove out of support hosts

[Resolved – February 1, 21:35] At about 5:20pm on February 1, scheduler for the new RHEL7 dedicated clusters went down after encountering a segmentation fault error.  We’ve resolved the incident, and brought the scheduler back online.  As far as we know, this incident impacted two jobs based on our assessment.  We advise that you review your jobs from today.  Additionally, users who may have attempted to submit jobs between 5:20pm – 9:35pm may have experienced scheduler communication errors when running qstat, qsub… commands.

We will continue to monitor the scheduler and update if needed. If you experience any further issues, please contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Thank you for your attention, and apologies for this inconvenience.

[Resolved, January 28] We had one of our main Mellanox IB switch’s partially go down on Sunday morning, which has left large amount of compute nodes without access to the IB interconnect.  Our system engineers have resolved the matter at about 9:41am, and the IB switch is back online.  As far as we know, the following queues have been impacted: athena-intel, atlantis, atlas-6-sunge, atlas-intel, force-6, joe-intel, joe-test, novazohar,, pace-devel, swarm, and zohar.   We advise that you review your jobs from this weekend/current jobs as this incident may have interrupted your jobs.  If your jobs have failed due to errors pertaining to MPI errors or files could not write to /scratch/ or  /data/[Your_Files], then please resubmit your jobs. 

We will continue to monitor this switch and update if needed.  If you experience any further issues, please contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Thank you, and sorry for this inconvenience.