SRCF Shutdown

As of 3:00 on Monday, July 3, power has been restored to the Stanford Research Computing Facility (SRCF), and the SRCC team is completing the restarting of systems and services. System users are being notified of system availability.

2:30 PM Monday, July 3: SRCC-supported systems are up and running for the most part. As with any extended downtime, there have been a few hardware failures, and the SRCC team will continue to work to get them up as soon as possible.
11:30 AM Sunday, July 2: Network is up and running, and the SRCF team has begun to restart systems. Physical access is available for those who need to be present to restart systems and services.
- NOTE: SRCF staff are unavailable until Wednesday, unless in an emergency
- NOTE: the SRCF elevator is unavailable until late Wednesday
5:30 PM Saturday, July 1: Power has been restored to the SRCF building; the team will begin bringing up network equipment on Sunday, July 2 around 8:00 AM. We anticipate that access to systems and the building will be available after 10:00 AM. Emails have been sent to technical points of contact and PIs.
5:00 PM Friday, June 30: Electrical work is mostly completed, and testing is continuing
9:30 AM Monday, June 26: All power to the SRCF is off
8:00 AM Monday, June 26: Network connectivity to the SRCF is now unavailable

Because of the outage, several SRCC services are unavailable; see the table below for details. For detailed information on the Oak storage service, and instructions on how to disconnect your Oak gateway (if applicable), please see the Oak User Google Doc.

Status information will be shared on this page, updated with any information that we have throughout the down time.

Shutdown Schedule for SRCC systems

System	Outage Start	Outage End (Expected)
Oak Storage Gateways	Friday, June 23 5:00 p.m.	Monday, July 3
Sherlock	Saturday, June 24 12:00 a.m.	Monday, July 3
SCG	Saturday, June 24 7:00 a.m.	Monday, July 3
Carina	Saturday, June 24 5:00 p.m.	Monday, July 3
Oak Storage	Sunday, June 25 7:00 a.m.	Monday, July 3

Frequently Asked Questions

We will continue to add questions as we fill in the details of the outage.

Will anyone be allowed in the building during the outage?
- Only the SRCC support staff will be allowed in the building, and all requests must be approved by the building manager.
When will the SRCF be completely unavailable for remote access?
- The network will be down beginning at 6:00 AM on Monday, June 26.
When can we begin to power our equipment back up?
- As of now, we are targeting Monday morning, July 3. If the building is available and safe earlier, we will update the time accordingly. In any case, an email will be sent to the srcf_tech_poc mailing list when power is restored.
Can I run my equipment on generator power during the time that the power is out?
- No, that will not be an option for this outage.
Can I move my equipment for the outage period?
- That’s a possibility; there may be some space in the Forsythe data center (RCF). If you are interested in this, you should contact SRCC as soon as possible to discuss by emailing to srcc-support@stanford.edu and including “SRCF” in the title of the email.
Do I need to back up my data?
- You may want to copy anything that you believe you’ll need to access during the outage, and it’s always a good practice to have data backups. We are not planning to move or delete any data as a part of this outage, so you should find your data in the same state after the outage.
Will data in the Sherlock scratch storage be lost during the outage?
- No. During the shutdown we will not purge any files that are in scratch. For example, a file created on June 12, 2023 will be automatically deleted from scratch after September 10, 2023. The standard 90-day policy will begin being enforced again after a one week grace period (beginning when the system comes up from the outage), so plan accordingly.
If I submit a job on Sherlock now, and the time I request exceeds the time remaining until the start of the downtime, what will happen?
- Your job will be queued until the maintenance downtime is over. If you want a job to run before the downtime, you can adjust the time requested with --time.

Don't see your question? Email srcc-support@stanford.edu with “SRCF” in the subject line.