As previously announced, the Stanford Research Computing Facility (SRCF) will undergo major power maintenance over the Labor Day week-end (Sep. 1-3, 2018).

Because it’s hosted in that datacenter, Sherlock will not be available for login, to submit jobs or to access files from Friday, Aug. 31ˢᵗ at noon to Tuesday, Sep. 4ᵗʰ at 9am.

Jobs will stop running and access to login nodes will be closed at noon on Friday, Aug 31st, to allow sufficient time for shutdown and pre-downtime maintenance tasks on the cluster, before the power actually goes out. If everything goes according to plan, access will be restored on Tuesday, Sep. 4 at 9am.

A reservation will be set in the scheduler for the duration of the downtime: if you submit a job on Sherlock and the time you request exceeds the time remaining until the start of the downtime, your job will be queued until the maintenance is over, and the squeue command will report a status of ReqNodeNotAvailable (“Required Node Not Available”).

Note that the hours leading up to a downtime are an excellent time to submit shorter, smaller jobs that can complete before the maintenance begins: as the queues drain there will be many nodes available, and your wait time may be shorter than usual.