Messages & Announcements

  • 2010-09-03:  Firefly unplanned network outage 9/3
    Category:  System Failure

    Firefly's fiber connection between PKI (where Firefly resides in) and Nebraska Hall in Lincoln was cut.

    The network engineers are working on restoring service.


    Firefly's fiber connection between PKI (where Firefly resides in) and Nebraska Hall in Lincoln was cut.

    The network engineers are working on restoring service.

  • 2010-08-20:  Scheduler change for PrairieFire Monday, Aug. 23
    Category:  General Announcement

    For historical reasons, the schedulers running on PrairieFire and Firefly have not been identical to date. After over a semester of use, the Maui scheduler has proven adequate for our current needs on Firefy, and we will be switching from SGE to Maui on Prairiefire on Monday of next week. HCC staff will be available to answer questions or meet with researchers if any problems are encountered.


    Reasons for using identical schedulers on by PrairieFire and Firefly include the following:

    Increased ease of use of both machines for HCC researchers.
    Simplified administration for HCC staff.
    Potential integration (unification) of the two clusters' scheduling environment.

    Reasons for selecting Maui include the following:

    Maui is open source and free.
    Maui is built on Torque, which is more similar to PBS Pro, currently running on Merritt. (Merritt is a special case and will not be changed.)
    SGE was formerly a product of Sun, which was purchased by Oracle. Its future is thus less certain.
    The commercial version of Maui (Moab) is used at several of the largest supercomputing centers in the country.

    Details for using Maui on PrairieFire may be found here:
    <a href='http://hcc.unl.edu/hcccreditedit/faq.php?tp=PFSched'>http://hcc.unl.edu/hcccreditedit/faq.php?tp=PFSched</a> .

    <i> Existing SGE scripts will no longer function. You will have to change these to a PBS-style script as discussed in the above link. </i>

    Please notify HCC staff if you have any difficulty or questions.

  • 2010-07-30:  Firefly fiber maintenance, July 30, 2010
    Category:  Maintenance

    A temporary fiber outage for Firefly is scheduled from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM July 30, 2010.

    Firefly's fiber network provider will be running diagnostics. During this period, Firefly's internet connection may be intermittently unavailable. Submitted jobs should continue to run.


    A temporary fiber outage for Firefly is scheduled from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM July 30, 2010.

    Firefly's fiber network provider will be running diagnostics. During this period, Firefly's internet connection may be intermittently unavailable. Submitted jobs should continue to run.

  • 2010-07-19:  Firefly planned outage July 19, 2010
    Category:  Maintenance

    We will schedule this outage Monday, July 19, 2010, starting 11:30 AM. This outage may potentially last until late in the day. We will send out an announcement once this patch has been applied.


    On July 2, 2010, we discovered a bug with the Panasas storage on Firefly. We sent out a message not to delete files larger than 2.8GB on /home or 7GB on /work as the storage blades on our Panasas storage would crash.

    Panasas has now made a fix available for this issue. We will need to schedule an outage on Monday, July 19, 2010 to apply this patch. While we understand that this means yet another outage for Firefly, this is a critical issue that needs to be solved to prevent potential data loss on /home and /work.

    We will schedule this outage Monday, July 19, 2010, starting 11:30 AM. This outage may potentially last until late in the day. We will send out an announcement once this patch has been applied.


    We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this outage.

  • 2010-07-12:  Firefly available for use
    Category:  System Failure

    Firefly is now available for use. The filesystem repairs ran over the weekend and completed successfully. We do not anticipate any data loss.

    During this outage, your jobs may or may not have completed successfully. Please check your jobs and resubmit them if they failed.

    While Firefly is available, the software bug in the Panasas storage device remains. The current estimate of when the bug fix will be available is this Friday (July 16, 2010). We will once again need to take Firefly offline to apply that software fix. We will send out an announcement when we have more information.


    Firefly is now available for use. The filesystem repairs ran over the weekend and completed successfully. We do not anticipate any data loss.

    During this outage, your jobs may or may not have completed successfully. Please check your jobs and resubmit them if they failed.

    While Firefly is available, the software bug in the Panasas storage device remains. The current estimate of when the bug fix will be available is this Friday (July 16, 2010). We will once again need to take Firefly offline to apply that software fix. We will send out an announcement when we have more information.