CISL staff will be performing necessary facility maintenance at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in early June to replace components within the power and cooling systems that have reached the end of serviceable life after more than a decade in operation. This critical but infrequent maintenance requires a favorable weather window as much of the work must be performed outdoors.
During the week of June 2-6 it will be necessary to shut down all Derecho compute nodes and the Quasar tape archive system so that the necessary cooling and power components can be serviced.
CISL intends to keep Derecho login nodes, Data Access nodes, the Campaign and Scratch storage systems, and all of Casper operational during this period using temporary, augmented cooling. We are finalizing aspects of this continuity plan and will provide additional details in future communications. There is a low risk that portions of Casper will also need to be shut down if required for thermal control.
We understand extended downtimes are difficult for the user community and have made every effort to lessen the impact of this critically important maintenance activity given all constraints.
