Over the last few months the ICTS facilities team have been preparing for a large data centre upgrade on Upper Campus. The data centre has been rewired allowing for a second UPS supply to the racks as well as a bypass of the generator circuit and better environmental monitoring. Partitioning has been added to the hot aisles within the data centre allowing for energy saving with the improved air handling and more efficient cooling of equipment.
However the equipment needs to be shut down to bring the new UPS online and to install the electrical supply bypass option. Additionally several racks need to be repopulated to remove old equipment, consolidate common hardware and allow for re-cabling to promote better air flow. This will be on top of software patches that will be applied to various servers in addition to several pieces of hardware that will be migrated from the real world to the virtual. While there are many things that can be done prior to the shut down it's inevitable that other tasks require the kit to be powered down. The net result of this is that we are going to need more time to get the HPC kit ready and hence we're moving the time for the HPC shut-down forward by 6 hours, from 6pm to 12pm Friday 20th June.
We will be sending out several emails over the next week to ensure that all of our users are aware of the impending shut-down and have check-pointed or ended their jobs by Friday afternoon.
Tim and Andrew during a planning session for the HPC upgrade.