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

The Weber cluster will be unavailable Wednesday, March 18, 2026 from 8:00am - 5:00pm EDT for scheduled maintenance. The cluster will return to full production by 5:00pm EDT.

During this time, Weber will have its operating system patched.

Any Slurm jobs which request a walltime which would take them past Wednesday, March 18, 2026 at 8:00am EDT will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

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.

** How does this change impact you? **

Login to Weber: The change will simplify logging into Weber. Weber users currently need to authenticate to Luna VPN or VDI with Luna credentials, and then additionally authenticate to Weber with BoilerAD credentials. After the change, users will just need to use their Luna password when logging into Weber resources, including via ThinlLinc, SMB, and SSH. Luna password will be the same password as is currently used to log into the VPN.

ThinlLinc: Anyone accessing Weber via ThinLinc directly from their endpoint will need to switch to using ThinLinc from a Luna Desktop.

Data Egress: File egress will be disabled, and users will need to submit a ticket each time they wish to transfer files outside weber. Egress to Apricon drives will no longer be supported on regular endpoints.

During the maintenance window, job scheduling though Slurm and network drive mounts of Weber storage will be unavailable.

These changes position Purdue to meet the requirements of CMMC Level 2 compliance and will be crucial for continuation of various grants and contracts.

Please reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu? if you have any questions.

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.

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 2:00 PM EST or sooner.

During this time, Weber will have its operating system patched.

Any Slurm jobs which request a walltime which would take them past Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025 at 8:00am EDT will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

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 will provide an update by 2:00pm 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.

The company, Quantum Research Sciences, developed its Product Obsolescence Prediction tool to help the US Air Force with inventory management. The Air Force has many pieces of equipment, all of which have many parts to keep track of with multiple vendors and distribution centers. Figuring out how to manage repair and replacement of all these parts is a very complicated problem that can’t be solved with classical computing resources.

The QRS team is able to use RCAC’s specialty Weber cluster to develop and train machine learning algorithms. Output from the Weber cluster is capable of improving inventory management technology. Another DoD project in Jung’s research group also utilizes the Weber cluster, then fed the output into a quantum computer to get answers back on the best procurement and inventory management strategy.

Weber, which was deployed in 2019, is unique among RCAC’s clusters and was built for situations like this involving data, applications, and research under export control regulations such as EAR, ITAR, or requiring compliance with the NIST SP 800-171.

“This and other projects wouldn’t have been possible without Weber,” says Andreas Jung, associate professor of physics and astronomy and the chief operating officer of QRS.

“It’s great that Purdue has this resource available for researchers’ use.”

The data Jung and his QRS colleagues were working with is known as “controlled unclassified information,” meaning data that isn’t classified by the government but is subject to special restrictions and regulations. Regular GPU and CPU clusters aren’t suitable for this type of data, but Weber, named after Purdue alumna and astronaut Mary Ellen Weber, was designed specifically for this purpose.

Quantum Research Sciences (QRS) is an American technology company focused on the discovery, development and delivery of practical quantum software. QRS created the DOD’s first operational quantum software and is working toward new quantum software applications every day. For more information on QRS, visit https://quantumresearchsciences.com/.

To learn more about Weber and other Research Computing resources, contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

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.

During this time, Weber will have its operating system patched and maintenance performed on the storage system.

Any Slurm jobs which request a walltime which would take them past Tuesday, March 25th, 2025 at 8:00am EDT will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

Licenses hosted on Marina will be unavailable for checkout for the duration of the maintenance. Licenses hosted elsewhere will not be affected. Slurm jobs on RCAC clusters started before 7:00 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.

Applications affected include:

• Abaqus
• Agilent
• Altera
• Ansys
• Arm
• Cadence
• Cadiq
• Compro
• Comsol
• Lsdyna
• Matlab
• Mg
• Mosek
• Msc
• Nomagic
• Originpro
• Plexim
• SALTD
• Schrodinger
• Synopsys
• Tecplot
• Ticcs
• Tsmc
• Ugs (NX/Teamcenter)
• Xilinx

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

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.