Updated Thursday, October 21, 2021, 12:00 pm:

Amarel (all campuses) is online and running normally. October’s regular monthly maintenance has been completed.

Our vision is to provide a better user environment, with rolling updates affecting one portion of the cluster at a time, instead of a whole system. We strive to perform maintenance in less active periods so that classes and grants are minimally affected.

In an to effort avoid long, intensive maintenance periods, we are shifting to a regular monthly maintenance schedule.

The new schedule is a tentative schedule with maintenance spanning up to 2 days each month, starting on the 3rd Tuesday of the month. We may not need the full 2 days each month, but we’ll reserve that time in case it is needed. Otherwise, the cluster will be returned to service early, immediately after the planned maintenance is complete. When possible, we will skip a month’s maintenance window entirely.

Each maintenance period is expected to begin at about 08:00 ET on the first day and end by about 19:00 ET on the 2nd day.

Anticipated maintenance schedule for the next 12 months:
FEB 16-17
MAR 19-20-21 (3/20 & 3/21 Hill Data Center maintenance, which will affect Amarel users)
APR 20-21
MAY 18-19
JUN 15-16
JUL 20-21
AUG 17-18
SEP 21-22
OCT 19-20
NOV 16-17
DEC 21-22 (may be shifted 1 week earlier)
JAN 18-19 (may be shifted 1 week earlier)

Maintenance is usually scheduled for weekdays because it often involves coordination with University facilities teams or external vendors. There may also be times when Amarel must be unavailable due to externally-scheduled data center facilities, power, or telecommunications maintenance. When this happens, we will do our best to avoid adding to a month’s downtime with our own maintenance work (e.g., by working in parallel or postponing some tasks).