Clusters back on line
Power has been restored and the clusters are back on-line. Please notify us if you spot any irregularities.…
Urgent notification of downtime, Sun 13 Jun
We have been notified that the UCT Upper Campus data centre will be
shut down for emergency electrical work, see notice below. Please
can you checkpoint or shut down your jobs by Saturday 12th July
20:00.
We apologise for this…
Maintenance feedback
What went right?
- The HPC rack was neatened up. This involved moving and consolidating servers, making space for PDU's and removing redundant cables that were impeding airflow. New HPC servers were installed. This task took two entire days as other
Changes to HPC
Our older cluster, hpc.uct.ac.za is undergoing several changes. The 200 series will soon be decomissioned. The nodes are old, have insufficient core density and are inefficient power-wise compared to more modern servers. The space in the racks is required for…
AWS postscript
So after waiting 24 hours and then looking at the AWS billing reports a couple of things stand out. At first we were puzzled as to why we were billed for Run Instances as well as Spot Instances. Turns out
…200 series upgrade
Node 200 had become a bit unstable over time so we reinstalled it. Same hardware, just upgraded to SL5.8. We also replaced nodes 216 and 217 with blades with 8GB of RAM to make the 200 series architecture homogeneous. After…
Cape Town power failure
Thanks to our data center UPS and generator our cluster remained up during today's city wide power failure. No jobs lost or data compromised.
…
…