Aquila system outage 30th June - 2nd July 2015

Posted in: HPC

On the 30th June the storage server providing /apps and /data lost power and resulted in the Aquila system becoming unresponsive. This issue was fixed by reseating the power supply unit on the storage node and the storage node boot cleanly. In running a Linpack test job to confirm system funcationality, two of the power units tripped due to a power overload. These power units are now about 8 years old and are probably a bit past their prime now. The load on the over all system has been reduced to prevent the breakers tripping again, and 24 nodes have been powered off.

Aquila is operating with 76 cpu nodes and 2 gpu nodes. A retest of the HPL job over 76 nodes went through smoothly.

On restoring the cluster, we have discovered a further issue this time a memory issue on one of the storage nodes providing the parallel FhGFS system.  We have diagnosed this as being an issue with one of the memory slots for the memory modules. We have reordered the memory modules in the DIMM slots which has allowed the system to come back up and has now restored the FhGFS storage service on Aquila.

Team HPC

Posted in: HPC