Now Sunbird is in full production, it is important to have a routine maintenance window to undertake core updates and modifications to the computing infrastructure. This will be a regular monthly maintenance window scheduled for the second Wednesday of each month.

The initial session is planned for Wednesday 13th February, 9AM-6PM during which time the system will not be available.

We will notify the community of any planned restrictions to access on any future dates, but the second Wednesday of each month should be considered at-risk going forward.

The system & queued job dispatch will be resumed as soon as work is complete. We will minimise the level of interruption to queued job execution by setting up a scheduler reservation for the duration of the work. Thus, jobs which cannot be finished in time will be kept in the queue and launched after the maintenance period rather than being launched & then interrupted before. This also means that there is likely to be capacity available for shorter jobs (as specified via the ‘#SBATCH -t’ parameter) as we approach the maintenance period.