The Computing Division completed the relocation of 192 "hequ" batch systems from Forsythe Hall on Stanford campus to Building 50 at SLAC. With teamwork and planning that involved Teri Church, John Weisskopf, Ron Barrett, Yemi Adesanya and Renata Dart, the systems were moved and put into production ahead of schedule with minimal downtime for our scientific community.
Scientific Computing Services devoted significant effort to diagnosing and reporting a complex NFS data corruption bug affecting our science customers. By working with those customers and developing a method to reproduce the problem, SCS was able to determine the bug existed only with newer versions of the Red Hat Linux kernel, thus enabling Red Hat engineers to submit a fix for the NFS kernel code. The fix will eventually make its way into the mainstream kernel, benefiting SLAC and all Red Hat Linux customers.
Scientific Computing Services worked with our technical coordination team to restore services on more than 250 systems that were disrupted by the site-wide power "sag" on Monday, January 13. The impact of the power fluctuation caused a range of problems for hosts, including shutdowns, reboots, loss of network connectivity and spurious messages on service processors which required power cycling to correct. The outage affected services for the ATLAS, Fermi and KIPAC science communities. SCS system administrators spent more than 25 hours restoring services for the lab.