The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) will be conducting its annual shutdown for maintenance work starting October 19, 2020. Northeastern’s Discovery cluster is physically located at MGHPCC and is included in this shutdown, along with the high performance cluster systems of Harvard, Boston University, Tufts, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Discovery will be powered down starting at 5:30AM on October 19. The shutdown is scheduled to last for two days (October 20 and 21), and we are currently anticipating that the Discovery cluster will be powered back on by 6pm on October 22, given that all work is completed in a timely manner.

This routine maintenance is normally performed in July, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown in the state of Massachusetts, this maintenance window was moved to October. In addition, out of an abundance of caution, this year’s maintenance window includes a staggered schedule for all participating universities. This is to help facilitate social distancing for the system administrators that will be on site for this time period. The result of this staggered schedule is a slightly extended outage period from previous MGHPCC shutdowns.  

All systems are affected by the shutdown, including all compute nodes, storage (including research and archive storage), and the Open onDemand web portal. Please be aware that any running jobs will be terminated on October 19 as the system is powered down.

We will send out periodic reminders of this event in the next few weeks. Please make sure to plan ahead for this once-a-year event. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at rchelp@northeastern.edu.