When is the next maintenance window (service stop)?

UPPMAX performs a scheduled maintenance window for our server hall once a month.

The maintenance day for all our systems occurs the first Wednesday that is a work day of every month.

How severe the maintenance window will be, and the expected consequences (if any) for running jobs, filesystems etc. will be announced 7 days before the scheduled maintenance window. An email is normally sent out to affected users 7 days before the maintenance window.

Why Wednesdays?

Several factors play a role. We do not want to risk that a long stop goes over the weekend (because we work office hours), so we cannot schedule the stop on Thursdays or Fridays. In order to use the most recent versions of software updates, and to minimise the risk of any surprises between planning and execution, we need to plan the stop on the day before, so we cannot schedule the stop on Mondays. The remaining choices are Tuesday or Wednesday, and we have chosen Wednesdays.

How can I avoid having to wait for like a week every time there's a stop?

Note that you can still submit long jobs before a service stop, but they wait in the queue until afterwards. Most of the time even during a maintenance stop, you can still reach the log-in nodes and continue working there.

Don't wait until Monday to submit jobs — if you make sure to submit long jobs on the Friday before a stop, you get 4 full days of run-time before the stop.

Snowy is maintained in a way that minimises maintenance stops. Most of the time, Snowy keeps running even when Rackham is stopped. Try sending jobs to Snowy (sbatch -M snowy) before and during maintenance windows.