Quest Unavailable for Maintenance Beginning September 19

Northwestern IT will perform necessary maintenance to Quest, the University's high-performance computing system, starting at 5 p.m. on Sunday, September 19, and ending at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 24. Quest, including Quest Analytics Nodes and the Kellogg Linux Cluster (KLC), will be unavailable during this maintenance window.

This maintenance is necessary to apply critical system patches and to improve network performance. Work includes the following:

• Upgrade the scheduler, Slurm, to version 20.11
• Apply operating system patches
• Upgrade Quest's network firmware
• Refresh Quest's high-speed network cables
• Additional Data Center network updates

Impact on the Quest Community

Please consider the following in preparation for the scheduled maintenance:

• Jobs with a wall time that extends beyond the start of the downtime will not run before the downtime and may need to be resubmitted after the maintenance.
• Jobs running on the Quest Analytics Nodes and KLC will be canceled at the beginning of the downtime.
• You will not be able to log in to Quest, submit new jobs, run jobs, access files stored on Quest, use Globus, or use the Quest Analytics Nodes and KLC during the maintenance window.

Quest users who need support in preparation for this work may contact Northwestern IT Research Computing Services at quest-help@northwestern.edu.

After the September maintenance, Northwestern IT will survey the Quest community to better identify maintenance windows with the most negligible impact.