Bluesky and blackforest to undergo routine preventive maintenance

Bluesky

Starting in July 2003, SCD will begin performing preventive maintenance on the IBM supercomputers at regularly scheduled times. Each machine will be taken out of production from 06:00–12:00 once a month—bluesky on the second Tuesday, blackforest on the fourth Tuesday.

Preventive maintenance will start for bluesky on July 8 and for blackforest on 22 July. Each machine will be down for six hours starting at 06:00, and will be restored to users at noon.

During preventive maintenance, SCD will apply software and firmware upgrades and make configuration changes, and IBM will perform routine hardware maintenance. The systems will also be rebooted.

The goal of having routine preventive maintenance is to consolidate system changes, minimize the need for multiple downtimes during the month, and provide the user community with predictable system outage times. Major software upgrades will still require separate and longer downtimes, but any work that can be completed in six hours will be saved for the next regular preventive-maintenance window.

These downtimes will affect the availability of cross-mounted NFS file systems. For example, /waccm, /ccsm, /acd, /cgd, etc. will not be available on bluesky when blackforest is down during preventive maintenance. Please plan ahead if you need access to data on these file systems during the scheduled downtimes.