Summary of BEAR Services affected
- BlueBEAR HPC : Reduced service
- BEAR Cloud ( VM ) : No service
- CaStLeS compute ( VM and Batch) : No service
NOTE: Other services such as DataShare, RDS, RDA, GitLab etc will NOT be affected.
Detail of BEAR migration (!)
Just a ‘heads-up’ about the forthcoming migration of BEAR infrastructure from Elms Road into the brand new and dedicated research data centre.
As most of you will know, following the boost of £2M for life sciences to add to the regular funding for BEAR compute and storage (almost £1M p.a.), the University also committed to build a new and highly efficient data centre, dedicated to supporting research. I’m delighted to report this facility will be ready for service in May this year. It will provide much needed added capacity, with radically reduced operational overheads and added redundancy to improve the availability of services.
As we mentioned at the recent BEAR User Forum, the process of migrating will mean some disruption to services. The removal process will begin on 17th May as we start taking the infrastructure apart in preparation for the move of about 10 tonnes of kit and thousands of cables. The Advanced Research Computing (ARC) Team will be working with a set of external engineers to ensure this goes according to plan with the aim of returning BEAR services to normal by 26th May.
BlueBEAR will be available but will be offering a much reduced service during this time, relying on the older generation of air-cooled nodes whilst the water-cooled infrastructure is disassembled and rebuilt (mostly in its new home). This also means research groups who have bought resources recently will only have access to the limited/general service or their old nodes for the duration of the move. Similarly, BEAR Cloud, including CaStLeS will be unavailable throughout.
Regrettably, this is unavoidable given both the scale and complexity of the undertaking but is something that we would not expect to experience again for a decade or more and represents a major investment in the future of computational power for research.
See the BEAR Blog for the latest news and this linked article for the impact on specific services.
We will be posting reports on the BEAR Blog, twitter (@uob_rescomp) and adding detail as the project progresses over the next 3 months. We will also be circulating emails to all users of our services.