Power to the Rondebosch area dropped again this morning, once for 2 minutes and then a brief brownout just after 11:30. We are assured that this is not "load shedding" by Eskom, although this is of little relief to anyone running long term work on a desktop not attached to a UPS. Even with a UPS unless a significant investment has been made in batteries a desktop machine will not stay up for more than an hour, and in the case of number crunching with the CPUs working at maximum capacity, this will drain a UPS's batteries at a much higher rate than most desktop computers. While laptops may stay up a bit longer they are not good value for money for HPC from a $/core perspective.
Fortunately our HPC and Grid clusters are located in UCT's data centres, each with its own UPS and in-line generator. So when our campus wide monitoring system looks like a christmas tree...
...our HPC users can be assured that their jobs are still ticking away.
...our HPC users can be assured that their jobs are still ticking away.