Storage issues with /scratch and networked storage
Nov. 20, 2020—At around 10am this morning we received alerts for the /scratch storage sub-system and subsequently for the networked storage sub-system. /scratch unmounted on 57 compute nodes and 20 GPU nodes as well as the gateways. An investigation of all three sub-systems (/data, /scratch, networked storage) showed that a few LUNs were unavailable due to three...
[Resolved] Downtime for /scratch storage on Wednesday 11/4 from 6am to 2pm CT
Oct. 27, 2020—Update, 11/4 2pm: The /scratch storage was successfully repaired during the exceptionally scheduled downtime this morning. Please feel free to resume activities that use /scratch and report any issues you may find. One of the GPFS disk groups of the /scratch storage had a drive failure, which is not unusual. We replaced the failed drive...
Network issues resolved and network storage stabilized; emergency update to GPFS applied
Sep. 20, 2020—9/22 3:05pm: ACCRE’s networked storage (aka DORS) is stabilized. We are working with the hardware vendor to determine why one of the controllers for that subsystem performed a service halt instead of a graceful fail over to the redundant controller. Please submit a helpdesk ticket for any new issues you might experience. 9/22 9:26am: This...
Staff Spotlight: Lindsey Fox
Sep. 2, 2020—Lindsey holds an M.S. in Engineering Science with an emphasis in Geology from the University of Mississippi. She has worked as a GIS Analyst in Vanderbilt’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department and most recently as GIS Coordinator to the campus community through the Vanderbilt Library. Lindsey has actively contributed to research teams investigating topics ranging from transportation to...
Staff Spotlight: Ashley Brammer
Aug. 31, 2020—Ashley is a graduate of Belmont University and has a diverse background in business operations management. Along with her role at ACCRE, Ashley also serves as an Administrative Specialist and Executive Secretary in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. When not working, she loves her animals, sewing dog sweaters, collecting anything vintage, and playing everything...
Increased user demand for ACCRE resources is generating a high volume of support tickets
Aug. 24, 2020—Increased user demand for ACCRE resources is generating a high volume of support tickets. Please bear with us as we work diligently to resolve user issues. You can view current ticket volume here.
Scheduled downtime is now complete
Aug. 3, 2020—Update, 8/27/2020: We have successfully completed all the In Scope upgrades, maintenance items, and testing for this downtime ahead of schedule. Therefore we will restore access to the cluster and helpdesk tonight at 8pm. Details on how to use new functionality provided by SLURM v20 will be posted once we have reviewed our test results....
[Resolved] Configuration setting to be applied Tuesday to resolve GPFS lagginess
Jul. 22, 2020—Update, 7/30/2020: We have identified, and tested, a configuration setting that decreases the time it takes to resolve user and group names by an order of magnitude. According to the vendor we can apply the new configuration without downtime. We plan on performing this configuration update after hours next Tuesday, Aug 4th. This new configuration addresses the...
Kernel issue results in paging
Jul. 14, 2020—Over the last few weeks we have been investigating incidents reported by several groups regarding compute node sluggishness. This was a particularly challenging analysis since the symptoms were not easily correlated. We have determined the root cause to be the behavior of the Linux kernel and we are able to reliably reproduce it using scheduled...
Introducing ACCREx: ACCRE’s Experimental Technologies Program
Jun. 10, 2020—ACCRE has been working to identify and adopt new solutions required by our researchers. The menu of production-level services currently available to PI’s can easily be found in iLab and represent the fundamental HPC resources common to research computing centers. Not too long ago, those types of systems were more than sufficient to satisfy the...