IN PROGRESS
UPDATE: 8:30am AEST – The Massdata upgrade process has been completed and NCI staff are currently in the testing phase. Massdata will be progressively returned to service as the testing is completed.
UPDATE: 3:00 pm AEST – The maintenance downtime for Massdata has been extended to 9:00 am AEST Wednesday 28 August. Massdata upgrade tasks are progressing per the maintenance work plan, but are taking longer than expected to complete. Massdata is expected to be available to users Wednesday morning (Wednesday ).
Start: 8:00 am AEST, Friday
End: 9:00 am AEST, Wednesday (REVISED)
Systems Affected: Massdata Archival Filesystem, mdss utility
The Massdata archival filesystem and mdss utility will be unavailable from 8:00 am AEST Friday 23 August through to 9:00 am AEST Wednesday 28 August.
NCI is performing system maintenance and software upgrades on the massdata environment to enable future performance and capacity improvements. During this four day maintenance window (23/08 → 26/08), users will be unable to upload or download data from the massdata environment.
Copy Queue (copyq) jobs correctly specifying the PBSPro job option #PBS -lother=mdss will be held during the maintenance window. Jobs with a walltime that cross the commencement of the downtime window will also be held until the completion of maintenance activities.
Other NCI Services such as Gadi, the /g/data filesystems, Nirin cloud, Data Catalogues, ARE and VMware are not affected by this maintenance activity.
Job Flag Advice
NCI advises that you specify #PBS -lother=mdss when submitting copyq jobs accessing files in massdata using the mdss utility. If the Massdata filesystem is not available, your job will be retained in the queues until the dependent filesystem is ready to service requests.
Omitting the appropriate flags may cause your job to be dispatched by the scheduler when the required filesystem are unavailable, which could result in unexpected job failure.
If you require further guidance on the usage of the PBS -lother= options, please contact the NCI User Services team via help@nci.org.au or https://help.nci.org.au
What do I need to do?
For virtually all users, no action will be required.
If you anticipate that you may need to process data you have stored on massdata during the maintenance window, we would suggest recalling the data to another filesystem (eg /scratch, /g/data) prior to the maintenance start time. The mdss utility will be unavailable during the maintenance window, any copyq jobs using the mdss command will not progress. Interactive usage of mdss will also be unavailable.
To ensure that projects that need to recall (read) data in preparation for the maintenance window, it is kindly requested that new data writes (mdss put) is minimised ahead of the maintenance occurring. This will allow the fixed number of tape drives in the Massdata Archive system to process required data reads before the maintenance period.
Do I need to change my scripts, or any other part of my workflow?
For most users, no. Existing PBS job scripts should work as-is. Directly impacted users will be contacted by NCI, however as with any software upgrade there may be slight differences in behaviour; if you find or suspect that you have been impacted please contact help@nci.org.au or https://help.nci.org.au
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