As part of the ongoing effort to upgrade data center capacity for future computing needs, maintenance is scheduled from Wednesday, April 22 at 6 AM through Thursday, April 23 at 5 PM. This will affect all RCAC systems and the Research Network.

During this window, all RCAC systems and research network services will be unavailable, including:

• All Computing Clusters including Bell, Negishi, Gautschi, Scholar, Rowdy, Gilbreth, Hammer, Anvil.
• All Data Storage Systems including Data Depot, Fortress, Anvil Ceph storage, scratch and home storage on clusters, Research Network and ScienceDMZ
• Gateway services including Hubzero, GenAI Studio, Anvil GPT
• www.rcac.purdue.edu
• Geddes
• Globus

How does this maintenance impact you?

• Any Slurm jobs requesting a walltime that would extend past the start of the maintenance will not start and will remain in the queue until after maintenance is complete.
• All active sessions and jobs running on affected systems will be preempted at the start of the outage any queued jobs will not begin until services are restored.
• Access to login nodes, storage systems, and web portals will be unavailable throughout the downtime.
• Automated data workflows that rely on affected systems (e.g., rsync, data pipelines, archive processes) will not function until systems are back online.
• Globus transfers may time out during the maintenance window.

To prepare for this maintenance, we suggest to:

• Download any needed data or scripts before 6:00 AM on April 22.
• Prepare instrumentation devices for the Data Depot to be unavailable and

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we complete these necessary upgrades to improve reliability and performance across RCAC infrastructure. For assistance, questions, or concerns contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Best regards, Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) / Purdue IT

Due to the outage, some jobs on Gilbreth did not requeue automatically. Users should check the status of any jobs that were running early this morning and resubmit them if needed.

This will affect the following services:

• CMS Front-End (aka 'Login') nodes;
• EOS storage;
• XCache;
• CVMFS;
• Hammer cluster SLURM jobs;
• Analysis Facility will operate in reduced capacity:
  • fewer CPUs, RAM and GPUs will be available;
  • CVMFS and EOS mounts will not be available;
  • XCache will not be usable.

Given the scale of the event, we have scheduled a 'full downtime' for our computing resources.

Users will be able to do some interactive work in the AF and the Community Clusters (other than 'Hammer'), as home-directories and Depot storage are not expected to be affected (they are hosted in the MATH Data-Center), but are strongly advised to not depend on the reliability of any services during the power outage period.

The current plan is to have all machines powered down before the end of day (5pm) on Wed. March 4th, and then have them powered back up by start of business (9am) on Thu. March 5th.

Please - plan your use of the resources accordingly. CMS Support Team

Impact to you Attempts to read files that are on the affected storage may result in error messages

Our IT team is actively working with the vendor to restore service as quickly as possible. We will send an update as soon as more information is available.

During this maintenance window, several clusters will experience a temporary outage so that hardware can be safely powered down while facility work is performed:

• Gautschi, Gilbreth, Negishi, Bell, and Anvil cluster nodes will be powered down.

• The Gilbreth’s legacy V100 GPUs, that are well past their lifetime, will be decommissioned.

• Hammer (Math nodes) and Geddes: A subset of nodes will be powered down but the services will be available, unless communicated separately.

How does this maintenance impact you?

• Clusters listed in this message won’t be available to run jobs during the maintenance.

• Any jobs requesting a walltime which would take them past the start of the maintenance will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

• Users can continue to access their data.

• GenAI studio will remain available. This maintenance will position Purdue to support growing computational needs. Users should see long‑term benefits in system reliability and our ability to support future computing and AI resources.

If you have questions about how this outage will affect your work or need support, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Impact To You: At this time, you may notice latency or brief disruptions when accessing certain on-campus or external resources, especially during peak usage periods.

We appreciate your patience while we work to fully resolve the underlying problem and restore normal network performance. We will provide an update by 5:00PM EST today or sooner.

System monitoring has identified an issue where heavy job activity was overloading the Data Depot filesystem used by the clusters and Globus.

You may see the following impacts:

• Globus transfers to and from Depot collections may fail, stall, or run much more slowly than usual.
• Globus logins may be slow or occasionally fail when accessing Depot endpoints.
• Jobs on RCAC clusters that read from or write to Depot may experience slow file access, delayed directory listings, or timeouts.

Our engineers are investigating the high load from a large number of concurrent jobs and are working to reduce the impact on Depot, Globus, and cluster workloads. Existing jobs will continue to run, but any that are heavily Depot‑I/O‑bound may run more slowly or see I/O errors until performance improves. We will provide another update by 5:00PM EST or sooner if the issue is resolved.

During this maintenance window, several clusters will experience a temporary outage so that hardware can be safely powered down while facility work is performed:

• Gautschi, Gilbreth, Negishi, Bell, and Anvil cluster nodes will be powered down.

• The Gilbreth’s legacy V100 GPUs, that are well past their lifetime, will be decommissioned.

• Hammer (Math nodes) and Geddes: A subset of nodes will be powered down but the services will be available, unless communicated separately.

How does this maintenance impact you?

• Clusters listed in this message won’t be available to run jobs during the maintenance.

• Any jobs requesting a walltime which would take them past the start of the maintenance will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

• Users can continue to access their data.

• GenAI studio will remain available. This maintenance will position Purdue to support growing computational needs. Users should see long‑term benefits in system reliability and our ability to support future computing and AI resources.

If you have questions about how this outage will affect your work or need support, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the status of all computing and data resources in an effort to ensure continuous availability.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the ticketing system throughout the holiday period and answer critical issues and problems. Non-critical user issues and questions will be addressed beginning January 5th, 2026. There will also be no coffee hour consultations during this break.

Scratch file purging (on community clusters with scratch space) will continue as normal during the break, so be sure to archive your files in scratch storage. This does not apply to Data Depot or home directories -- only scratch storage.

Have a wonderful break, everyone, and we look forward to great things in the new year!

We will provide an update by 9pm.

The Data Depot file system has returned to full service and scheduling has resumed on all clusters.

The Data Depot storage system began experience issues starting around 9am EDT this morning. Engineers are currently diagnosing the issue and are working to identify a fix. Job scheduling has been paused while this issue is being addressed.

We will provide an update by 12pm (noon).

Data Depot functionality has been restored.

The Data Depot file system began experiencing issues with writes around 2:30pm EDT. The data migration process currently ongoing from Data Depot 2 to Data Depot 3 ran into an unexpected problem. Engineers have identified the problem and are correcting it. Users may have seen "no space left on device" for approximately 30 minutes. Job scheduling has been paused while this issue is being addressed.

We will provide an update by 5 PM.

Thank you!

Update: 3:00PM, EDT: Systems returning but queues are still paused on all clusters except for Bell and Hammer. Some clusters are waiting for full cooling to come fully back online. Next update at 4:00PM, EDT, or when all systems are returned to service.

Update: 2:30PM, EDT: Systems are steadily coming back online. Queues are still paused. Next update at 3:00PM, EDT.

The Rosen Center is currently experiencing an outage on all clusters due to a widespread power outage event on the Purdue West Lafayette Campus.

Currently engineers are bringing all services back up. Scheduling on all clusters will be resumed once services have stabilized.

We expect services to back shortly. We will update on the situation at 2:30PM, EDT.

We know how important timely access is to your research and truly appreciate your patience as this gets sorted out. If you have an urgent need or specific concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Thanks again for your understanding.

We are actively monitoring the situation and working to resolve the disruptions as quickly as possible. During this time, you may encounter intermittent connectivity problems or degraded performance.

We appreciate your patience and understanding. If you encounter problems that require immediate attention, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu. For Anvil users, please submit a ticket through ACCESS Help Desk at https://support.access-ci.org/help-ticket.

This is a reminder that the RCAC license server will be unavailable on today from 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM EST for scheduled maintenance. Licenses hosted by RCAC will be unavailable for checkout for the duration of the maintenance, and Slurm job scheduling will be paused.

Original Message:

The RCAC license server will be unavailable on Thursday, February 20th, 2025 from 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM EST for scheduled maintenance. During this time, the server will migrate to an upgraded host with security enhancements.

Licenses hosted by RCAC will be unavailable for checkout for the duration of the maintenance, and Slurm job scheduling will be paused. Licenses hosted outside of RCAC will not be affected. Jobs started before 11:00 AM will not be affected unless a license must be checked out in the middle of job execution. Jobs may still be submitted to Slurm during the maintenance, but will not be scheduled until after its completion. After this maintenance, RCAC license server access will require a connection to a local Purdue network or to the Purdue VPN (webvpn.purdue.edu).

If you have any questions or comments regarding this migration, please reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work through this final step of upgrading the operating system on the Hammer cluster.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the status of all computing and data resources in an effort to ensure continuous availability.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the ticketing system throughout the holiday period and answer critical issues and problems. Non-critical user issues and questions will be addressed beginning %enddate%. There will also be no coffee hour consultations during this break.

Scratch file purging (on community clusters with scratch space) will continue as normal during the break, so be sure to archive your files in scratch storage or check for any upcoming purge warning emails during the break. This does not apply to Data Depot or home directories -- only scratch storage.

Have a wonderful break, everyone, and we look forward to great things in the new year!

However, due to reduced staff availability during this period we will be canceling our regularly scheduled Coffee-Hour consultations session for that week. This includes both the Monday in-person consulting hours at the Convergence Center as well as the Tuesday virtual sessions.