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IT Service Status
IT Service Status

Quest Downtime Scheduled to Begin September 12

Posted Date: May 18, 2022

Effective Date: August 3, 2022

Northwestern IT is performing scheduled maintenance on the Quest computing cluster, including the Quest Analytics Nodes, the Genomics Compute Cluster, and the Kellogg Linux Cluster (KLC), beginning at 5 a.m. on Monday, September 12, and ending at approximately 5 p.m. on Tuesday, September 20. This maintenance is necessary to apply critical system patches and upgrades that have become available since the last downtime. Quest, including access to data on Quest, will be unavailable throughout the entire maintenance period.

During this downtime, the following maintenance will be performed:

  • Quest’s job scheduler, Slurm, will be upgraded to version 22.05
  • The operating system on all Quest nodes, including login, compute, KLC, and Analytics Nodes, will be upgraded to Red Hat version 7.9
  • FastX2 desktop client and web portal will be retired, and the existing FastX3 server will be upgraded to the latest version
  • Storage system firmware and InfiniBand drivers will be upgraded to improve security and stability
  • The latest security patches will be applied to all Quest nodes
  • NVIDIA GPU Drivers will be updated to version 515, which supports CUDA 11.7

Impact on the Quest User Community

  • Jobs submitted to Quest with a wall time that extends beyond the start of the downtime will not run before the downtime. Users may need to resubmit these jobs after the maintenance. Such jobs will receive a “ReqNodeNotAvail, Reserved_for_maintenance” message as the queue reason.
  • Jobs running on the Quest Analytics Nodes and KLC will be canceled at the beginning of the downtime.
  • Users will not be able to log in to Quest, submit new jobs, run jobs, access files stored on Quest, or use the Quest Analytics Nodes and KLC during the maintenance window.
  • Globus data transfer tool will be unavailable to transfer files from/to Quest and between Quest and RDSS/FSMResFiles.
  • FastX2 will not be supported after the maintenance. Users are recommended adopting FastX3 before the maintenance to avoid any interruptions in connecting to Quest.
Please visit the Status of University IT Services for updates during the maintenance window.

If you have questions or concerns about this scheduled maintenance, please contact the Research Computing Services team at quest-help@northwestern.edu.