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Q2 Scheduled Maintenance Downtime

NCI systems will be offline for scheduled maintenance from 5:00 am AEST Wednesday 1 May 2024 until 6:00 pm AEST Thursday 2 May. 

All NCI systems, including HPC systems, user support (portal, email), MyNCI, documentation, and Nirin cloud system, will be unavailable to users due to the extensive scope of planned maintenance. Most production systems will need to be powered off to accommodate parts of the maintenance plan, which includes electrical power upgrades to NCI and parts of the ANU campus, and cooling upgrades in the NCI data centre. Physical access to NCI Building 143 will also be restricted to essential staff only on 1-2 May. 

Q2 scheduled maintenance will include:

  • Electrical power infrastructure upgrades for NCI (ANU Building 143) and ANU south precinct
  • NCI data centre cooling system upgrades
  • Gadi system updates
  • Lustre file system updates (includes /scratch and all /gdata file systems)
  • Cloud system updates
  • Updates to ARE and data services

NCI will send weekly all-user advisory updates throughout April to keep users informed. 

NCI thanks you for your patience. This downtime involves significant updates to power and cooling infrastructure underpinning all NCI systems and services, and will support future HPC and data systems with greater capacity and performance. 

Gadi - How to prepare

Gadi users can do the following to prepare for this scheduled downtime:

  • Run any significant Gadi jobs needed to support milestones or deadlines as soon as possible during April.
  • Back up or move any important data in /scratch directories to appropriate longer-term storage locations, e.g. project directories on /gdata before 30 April.
  • Pause any automated scripts used for routine tasks involving Gadi, /scratch, /gdata or cloud or data services, and develop a plan to restart these after completion of maintenance. 
  • Plan for interruption to any services which rely on Lustre file systems: /scratch, /gdata. 

Gadi job queues will be drained in advance of the scheduled downtime. Queued jobs that would normally be scheduled to run during the maintenance period will be held until Gadi resumes normal operation. 

Nirin Cloud - How to prepare

All virtual machines running on the NCI Nirin Cloud service will be shut down no later than 5:30 am AEST on 1 May. 

If your project VMs have application dependencies, for example, a database service which should be shutdown before a presentation service, the NCI Cloud team requests that you perform a controlled shut down of all VM resources before 5:30 am AEST Wednesday 1 May. All projects will need to plan to restart all VM services via the Nirin Dashboard (https://cloud.nci.org.au) after completion of the maintenance downtime. (Note that automated restart via metadata tags is no longer supported for Nirin cloud.)

ARE - How to prepare

All ARE services will be shut down prior to the maintenance downtime at 5:30 am AEST Wednesday 1 May. ARE services will be automatically restored at completion of the maintenance downtime.

User Support

Contact NCI user support if you have specific questions about how to prepare for the scheduled maintenance downtime 1-2 May: help@nci.org.au .

Please note that support will not be available on Wednesday 1 May. Support requests received during scheduled maintenance will be addressed as soon as possible after NCI resumes normal operations. NCI recommends that users watch the Gadi message of the day service for status information during the maintenance downtime.


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