FAS Research Computing - Notice history

From our partners at NESE. Details follow:

We are installing four new tape frames, which will bring the tape system raw storage capacity to 253 petabytes.

Service Affected: NESE Tape Service

Maintenance Window: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM (EST)

• The tape service will be unavailable.

• All upgrade activities are expected to be completed on the same day.

NOTES:

• Monitor the MGHPCC Slack #nese channel for status updates and announcements

• Monitor https://nese.instatus.com/ for real-time updates on progress

Subscribe to https://nese.instatus.com/subscribe/email for updates and announcements

From our partners at NESE. Details follow:

In the process of the tape front-end file caching system upgrade, we will be installing a new IBM Storage Scale System 6000. We will provide an additional update for when the software integration and data transfer from the current IBM Elastic Storage System 5000 will be performed.

Service Affected: NESE Tape Service

Maintenance Window: No Downtime expected

NOTES:

• Monitor the MGHPCC Slack #nese channel for status updates and announcements

• Monitor https://nese.instatus.com/ for real-time updates on progress

• Subscribe to https://nese.instatus.com/subscribe/email for updates and announcements

Monthly maintenance will take place on Monday February 2nd, 2026. Our maintenance tasks should be completed between 9am-1pm.

NOTICES:

• Training: Upcoming training from FASRC and other sources can be found on our Training Calendar. at https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/upcoming-training/

• Status Page: You can subscribe to our status to receive notifications of maintenance, incidents, and their resolution at https://status.rc.fas.harvard.edu/ (click Get Updates for options).

• We'd love to hear success stories about your or your lab's use of FASRC. Submit your story here.

MAINTENANCE TASKS

Cannon cluster will be paused during this maintenance?: YES
FASSE cluster will be paused during this maintenance?: YES

• MaxTime change
  

  • Audience: Cluster users

  • Impact: In order to improve scheduling efficiency and stability, we will be setting a maximum run time on all partitions that have MaxTime set to UNLIMITED to a MaxTime of 3 days. The unrestricted partition will be set to 365 days. Partitions that already have MaxTime set will retain their current setting. Partition owners wishing to set a different MaxTime for their partition should contact FASRC. Note that we do no guarantee uptime and so users should utilize checkpointing to save state in case of node failure.

• Slurm upgrade to 25.11.2
  

  • Audience: All cluster users

  • Impact: Jobs will be paused during maintenance

• OOD node reboots
  

  • Audience; All Open OnDemand users

  • Impact: OOD nodes will reboot during the maintenance window

• Login node reboots
  

  • Audience; All login node users

  • Impact: Login nodes will reboot during the maintenance window

Thank you,
FAS Research Computing
https://docs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/
https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/

Monthly maintenance will take place on January 12th, 2026. Our maintenance tasks should be completed between 9am-1pm.

NOTICES:

• Changes to SEAS partitions, please see tasks below.

• Changes to job age priority weighting, please see tasks below.

• Status Page: You can subscribe to our status to receive notifications of maintenance, incidents, and their resolution at https://status.rc.fas.harvard.edu/ (click Get Updates for options).

• We'd love to hear success stories about your or your lab's use of FASRC. Submit your story here.

MAINTENANCE TASKS

Cannon cluster will be paused during this maintenance?: YES
FASSE cluster will be paused during this maintenance?:YES

• Slurm upgrade to 25.11.1

  • Audience: All cluster users (Cannon and FASSE)

  • Impact: Jobs will be paused during maintenance

• In conjunction with SEAS we will modify seas_gpu and seas_compute time limits 

  • Audience: SEAS users

  • Impact:
    seas_gpu: will be set to 2 days maximum
    seas_compute: will be set to 3 days maximum

    Existing pending jobs longer than these limits will be set to 2 day and 3 day run times depending on partition.

• Job Age Priority Weight Change

  • Audience: Cluster users

  • Impact: We will be adjusting the weight applied to the priority earned by jobs by virtue of their age. Currently job priority is made up of two factors, Fairshare and Job Age. The Job Age factor is currently set such that jobs gain priority over 3 days with a maximum priority equivalent to jobs with Fairshare of 0.5. This keeps low fairshare jobs from languishing at the bottom of the queue. With the current settings though, users with low fairshare can gain significant advantage over users with higher relative fairshare. To remedy this we will be adjusting the Job Age weight to cap out at an equivalent Fairshare of 0.1. This will still allow jobs with 0 fairshare to gain priority and thus not languish while letting fairshare govern a wider range of higher priority jobs.

• Login node reboots

  • Audience; All login node users

  • Impact: Login nodes will reboot during the maintenance window

• Open OnDemand (OOD) node reboots

  • Audienc:; All OOD users

  • Impact: OOD nodes will reboot during the maintenance window

• Netscratch retention will run

  • Audience: All cluster netscratch users

  • Impact: Files older than 90 days will be removed. Please note that retention cleanup can and does run at any time, not just during the maintenance window.
    

Thank you,
FAS Research Computing
https://docs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/
https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/