Author name: Asya Dvorkin

Hello, everyone.

This is a reminder that we are one week away from the CS Cycles/Ionic/Neuronic Systems downtime.

Thank you,
CS Staff

—– Forwarded Message —–
From: csstaff@cs.princeton.edu
To: downtime@lists.cs.princeton.edu
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2025 9:05:04 AM
Subject: [downtime] CS Cycles/Ionic/Neuronic Systems Downtime, Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 07:00-15:00

Date: Tuesday, January 13, 2026 (07:00-15:00)

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.

In addition, the cluster management and job scheduling system, Slurm, along
with its database, will also be upgraded. No data loss is anticipated.

Why is it happening:
This is part of the routine maintenance and will bring newer versions of
installed tools and software.

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

Hello, everyone.

In order to accommodate several research and conference deadlines that were brought to our attention, we have adjusted the maintenance window to Wednesday, November 19 at 5:00 am.

Thank you,
CS Staff

—– Original Message —–
From: csstaff@cs.princeton.edu
To: downtime@lists.cs.princeton.edu
Sent: Monday, November 3, 2025 9:24:13 AM
Subject: [downtime] CS Storage Maintenance, Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 09:00-15:00

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025 (09:00-15:00)

Who is affected:
All users of the CS department storage or computing facilities.

What is happening:
We are upgrading our storage operating system, which requires the
components of the CS storage system to be rebooted. This upgrade is
expected to be mostly non-disruptive, and department services will continue
as usual, but sporadic moments of interruption may be noticeable at times.

All services that depend upon access to storage share the same minor risk
of performance hiccups for some periods during this window, including cycle
servers, ionic and neuronic clusters, web content, home directories, CIFS,
etc.

Why is it happening:
In July, we identified that a filesystem bug affecting critical shared
storage was causing intermittent failures of some of our web services. This
problem, which occasionally restricted required access and disrupted site
availability, and had no viable workaround, has been under review while we
awaited an official fix from Dell. During the upcoming upgrade, we will
apply the newly released OneFS patch to resolve this issue and enhance
overall service reliability.

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