At the end of each year, USC departments cease operations for a winter recess period. This year, the CARC will be closed for the holidays beginning Monday, December 21, 2020, reopening on Monday, January 4, 2021. Non-emergency work will be paused until the new year. In the case of an emergency, tickets can still be submitted via our ticket submission form.
During this recess, USC Facilities Management Services will be performing a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) system upgrade in the ITS data center. This upgrade affects all systems that utilize the data center, including CARC systems. The power system upgrade will commence on Sunday, December 27 at 8:00 pm. All CARC systems, including Discovery, Endeavour, and the file systems, will be down during this maintenance period. Please plan accordingly so your research work is not impacted. We will keep you updated on this event as we get more details before the winter recess.
A special reservation in Slurm is configured not to take any jobs running past 8:00 pm on December 27. Users on Discovery do not need to worry about the runtime limit for new jobs (48 hours max), but Endeavour condo cluster users should note that new jobs that run longer than 3 weeks will not start until the completion of the upgrade. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact us by submitting a help ticket.
Because this downtime will depend on the timeline by Facilities Management Services, we cannot guarantee on which day we will bring CARC systems back up. As soon as the upgrade is completed, we will then bring our systems back up, which we anticipate could take ~2 days. At the latest, we expect to have our systems back up by January 6. We will send out an announcement once the systems are accessible again. We apologize for such a long period of downtime, but this critical upgrade affects all systems that use the data center, including ours.
From everyone at the Center for Advanced Research Computing, we hope you have a safe and warm holiday season. We look forward to continuing to support your research in 2021!