Nodes turned off to save power closed

As you probably know, the strain on the Swedish and European power systems is extreme at the moment. UPPMAX has made efforts to reduce power usage during the fall, with no intended impact on users. Due to the very high power prices during December so far, and general public requests to reduce power usage, we have for now turned off a number of nodes in Bianca, Snowy, and Miarka. Based on recent usage statistics, this will have a very limited impact on actual computation throughput, with the exception of temporary peaks. For the same reason, we are not turning off any Rackham nodes, since usage is consistently high there.

We will keep monitoring the national power situation as well as the queue situation on our clusters. This can mean turning off additional resources over the holidays, or turning them back on again. We are not planning for a general shutdown of any resource, just a modest reduction in the number of available nodes.

Update 2022-03-21 09:26

We may occasionally still choose to turn off nodes, but since we only do so rarely and to a limited extent, we’re closing this general system status notice.

Update 2022-02-13 12:30

Power prices have moved in both direction in 2023. We are manually increasing and decreasing the number of idle nodes in each system, depending on the number of queued jobs for a particular node type. We continue to monitor the power situation as well as the queue situation on our systems.

Update 2022-12-26 12:30

Power prices have declined again. On Miarka and Bianca, the queues are pretty empty, so we keep nodes turned off to save power. Since queue levels on Snowy are higher and prices right now during the holidays are back at normal levels, we have restored operations to the turned off Snowy nodes.