Reduced staff availability over the coming holidays combined with lots of tickets

There is currently a problem with the Slurm master node which affects users on Rackham and Milou. We are investigating.

Wednesday 7th of March UPPMAX began our monthly service window. Systems and services may become unreachable during the day.

We have received reports of missing files and directories inside the /proj and /proj/nobackup directories on Bianca. Upon inspection the files are actually there, but are not shown by the "ls" command. If you are working on Bianca, you should be aware of this as for example jobs of type “process all files in directory X and compile the result” might finish fine but create false results due to missing input, thus risking incorrect results and conclusions.

A workaround was implemented on Wednesday 2018-03-08 that mitigates this issue.

UPPMAX is happy to announce that Bianca now provides GPUs available for all its users! GPUs are a type of accelerator that may significantly increase performance for certain workloads, for instance, workloads that contain large amounts of identical operations on independent pieces of data (so called data parallellism).

Home directories have occasionally been extremely slow today. Nothing seems broken but the system is under a lot of pressure from time to time.

We are currently seeing and receiving reports on login issues on Rackham.

The fat (256GB) Rackham nodes is currently unavailable due to an issue with Slurm. We are investigating this issue.

Due to an issue with the storage system Crex the Slurm queue on Rackham is currently on hold. This is a summary of the problem.

We are experiencing problems with crex, the file system on Rackham. In order to not put more strain on the filesystems we will not allow new jobs to start at the moment. If you submit jobs they will be held in the queue.

The fysast1 cluster is back online

The Milou cluster is back on line
 

The Rackham cluster is back online

The Bianca cluster is back online following our service window.

For the February service we will install our new UPS, update Slurm on all clusters, extend the capacity of the storage system Lupus (for Irma), and of course perform the standard kernel and security updates.

A central switch will be restarted tomorrow Thursday 2018-01-31. The cloud will become temporarily unavailable from the outside i.e. Internet.

The Slurm master on Rackham is currently overloaded and you may experience sluggish Slurm behavior or timeout issues when running commands such as interactive, jobinfo and squeue. We are investigating this issue.

Some projects volumes on pica are slow, this may also possibly affect home directories.

A network problem has been detected on Bianca causing logins to fail for a few of the most recent Bianca projects . We are working on fixing the problem, and expect to Bianca fully working again very soon.
 

Wednesday 2018-01-10

Monthly maintenance window begins at 0900 hours on the first Wednesday of the month. (That is  today.)

This time we will:

• Upgrade Slurm, Linux kernel and other system software on Bianca, Dis, Fysast1, Irma, Milou, and Rackham.
• Upgrade Linux kernel and other system software on Castor and Grus.

Bianca and Grus will be unavailable while we service them.

We will restart all login nodes of Fysast1, Irma, Milou and Rackham, probably only once.

Slurm queues on Fysast1, Irma, Milou and Rackham will be stopped, but access to Slurm commands will mostly work during the day.

Slurm queues on Bianca will be stopped and, most of the day, logins to Bianca will not be possible.

We plan to keep you informed about out progress with the maintenance with updates here.

UPDATE 2018-01-10, 16:00

Irma is up and running. Bianca, Milou, Rackham and Fysast1 are still down. We will continue security upgrades tomorrow (Thursday) morning.

UPDATE 2018-01-11, 15:15

Irma, Milou, Rackham and Fysast1 are up and running. Bianca is still being tested. Hopefully Bianca will be back today.

UPDATE 2018-01-11, 16:00

Bianca is now up, however, graphical login is not working right now. Text login works fine (http://www.uppmax.uu.se/support/user-guides/bianca-user-guide/).

We're still working on Dis and expect it to be up by tomorrow.

The vendor visited us last week and did the physical installation of the lupus extension. Unfortunately, some parts were not correct and we're currently waiting for exchanges that are expected to arrive this week.

We hope 2018 has been good to you so far! UPPMAX staff is back after the holidays and we're focusing on support tickets that have built up over the holidays.

The creation of new Bianca project are currently on hold. If your project is scheduled to start today you will be unable to login.
 

milou2 rebooted on Friday 2017-12-08 at 03:52

milou2 rebooted on Wednesday 2017-12-06 at 03:58

We are performing a change in our infrastructure today starting at 13:00. This change will temporarily stop updates from SUPR reaching UPPMAX. If you have for example recently joined or added a member to a project, you will have to wait before the change becomes visible at UPPMAX.
 

If you regularly end up with broken SSH-connections ("broken pipe") to your virtual machine in the UPPMAX region, please use the SSH option ServerAliveInterval. See below for an example.

At this moment there is an issue with the Intel license server. You will be unable to use the icc compiler and Intel tools until this issue is resolved.
 

The UPPMAX support will be low on staff on Monday 2017-11-20 due to conference.

Our support email address support@uppmax.uu.se was down for a couple of hours, but is back in service again.

 

Bianca users outside of SUNET will be unable to login using rackham.uppmax.uu.se. We have created a temporary workaround.

2017-11-17 09:35 Rackham is now back in regular service.

Login nodes are now open on Rackham, and jobs are expected to run as usual on Friday morning.

It was decided to temporarily close down the Rackham cluster last Thursday when several disks on Crex reported themselves broken. The problems now seems solved, and we're awaiting results from the last tests before Rackham is fully back in service.
 

UPPMAX experienced a power outage in the server hall on Tuesday.

The /sw part of Bianca was lost around 07:30 this morning due to an issue with the storage system. This may have caused failed jobs. The system was fixed 08:40.

Monthly maintenance window begins at 09:00 hours on the first Wednesday of the month. (That is  today.)

/sw/data from pica may have been unavailable for some jobs during the week end and some jobs may have failed because of this.

RT, the support system UPPMAX and all the rest of SNIC is using, is down.
It is located at NSC at  Linköping University and the whole university has network problems.

This will make all email to and from support@uppmax.uu.se delayed until the network problem is fixed. So answers to Your support tickets will be delayed.

UPDATE: 11:45

We now have contact with our support system and emails to support@uppmax.uu.se are reaching us again.

Someone seems to be running something very I/O-heavy from the home directories. We are looking for these jobs and will terminate them if found, but it's less than certain that we'll find them.

UPDATE: 14:45 
We found the guilty jobs and are termintating them and have notified the user not to do that again.

We sadly inform you that today at 17:02:37 a human error caused the compute nodes on Irma to reboot. The jobs running was canceled and will show up with status NODE_FAIL. The accident occured while investigating an issue with the storage network. We are very sorry about this.

UPPMAX made a small change in "jobinfo" output.

In the REASON column for waiting jobs, "(Maintenance)" is shown for jobs that can not start before the next maintenance reservation.

Please note that maintenance reservations many times are moved forward to next month before the actual maintenance window.

Three racks of Irma's compute nodes lost power,because an automatic fuse shut down.

Some jobs were lost due to this.  We are very sorry about that. Please rerun those jobs that were affected.

It looks like nodes i[167-250] were affected.
 

So what was the reason? It looks like an ethernet switch diied, possibly short circuited, so the automatic fuse shut down, getting more switches and the compute nodes to go down.

We have error reported to our support vendor. Until the bad ethernet switch has been repaired or replaced, Irma runs with a fewer number of compute nodes.

Update at 0950 hours

Now only nodes i[179-226] are down.

milou2 rebooted Monday 2017-08-28 at 19:51.