Messages & Announcements

2018-01-03:  Impending Shutdown
Category:  Maintenance

A significant kernel side-channel attack vulnerability has been identified; patches should be available soon. Users should be aware that once patches are available, it will be necessary to take machines down to patch this significant security vulnerability. This includes Crane and Anvil, and possibly Tusker and Sandhills. We anticipate this maintenance will happen as soon as tomorrow morning.

More details will be sent as they become available.

Happy New Year ...
David Swanson

HCC clusters went down earlier this afternoon for unscheduled maintenance to address a security flaw in the Intel-based processors found in Crane and Anvil. This newly patched kernel, which also addresses other security vulnerabilities, was applied to Tusker and Sandhills as well.

We realize an unexpected shutdown is never preferred, but since classes start next week and all clusters were subject to well-known exploits, it was not possible to give more notice. We ourselves were waiting on the release of a patched kernel, which was fortunately released days earlier than originally anticipated.

All jobs that were killed will be rescheduled. This patch may cause performance degradation on Intel processors (Crane, Anvil). Please let us know asap if you notice a significant slowing of your application, and we will work to mitigate this wherever possible.