August 2026

Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2026 (06:00-12:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS Department Beowulf high performance computing clusters,
known as ionic and neuronic.

All users of the CS Staff-managed public login systems, including the cycles, courselab, and armlab systems.

What is happening:
CS Staff will upgrade the Ionic and Neuronic clusters, as well as the Cycles, Courselab, and Armlab systems, to the latest Red Hat 9 distribution.

Please note that we expect to finish the upgrades earlier than this window,
but the wide time frame acknowledges the uncertainties involved.

Why is it happening:
This is part of our regular maintenance to keep systems secure and
reliable. As security threats continue to grow, we’ll be updating our
systems more frequently to protect personal data and close software
vulnerabilities.

We will post updates to the status page: www.csstaff.org
as necessary.

If this downtime will cause you undue hardship, please contact
csstaff@cs.princeton.edu immediately, so we can discuss options to reduce
any negative impact. Your patience is appreciated.

Sincerely,
CS Staff

Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2026 (07:00-09:00)

Who is affected:
All CS department services will experience short periods of disruption
within the maintenance window.

What is happening:
We will be upgrading network switches located at the Forrestal Campus Data
Center. The plan is to perform the most disruptive outages during the start
of the scheduled downtime, followed by smaller isolated outages near the
end of the scheduled downtime.

Why is it happening:
The firmware on these switches is in need of an upgrade in order to patch
for security issues, bugs, to standardize firmware versions across our
equipment, and to implement new features on our network switches for future
projects.

We will post updates to the status page: www.csstaff.org
as necessary.

If this downtime will cause you undue hardship, please contact
csstaff@cs.princeton.edu immediately, so we can discuss options to reduce
any negative impact. Your patience is appreciated.

Sincerely,
CS Staff