HPCf Services During Hurricane Maria

As you all probably know, hurricane Maria is, at the time of writing, set to impact Puerto Rico starting this Wednesday as a category 4 hurricane. We are writing this post to explain what to expect from HPCf services during this time. In short, HPCf services will operate just like they did during hurricane Irma.

The HPCf machines are currently hosted at a private data center outside of any UPR campus or property. Our systems should be protected during the hurricane, and HPCf services (including jobs running on Boqueron) should continue to run as usual. If you manage to get electricity and an Internet connection (or if you are currently outside of Puerto Rico), you could, in theory, continue to work with HPCf resources even during the hurricane and its immediate aftermath.

That said, HPCf staff will not be available to provide regular support or maintenance to HPCf resources during the hurricane. That means that any help tickets will, unfortunately, remain unanswered until hurricane Maria has safely moved away from Puerto Rico. How quickly HPCf staff will be able to respond to support tickets during the aftermath of Maria will largely depend on the damage that Maria causes nationwide.

We are optimistic that our computers will not suffer downtime during the hurricane, but please keep in mind that it is still always a possibility that an outage could occur at the data center, and that such an outage could have unpredictable impact on user data. If you currently have absolutely crucial data on HPCf systems that you have not yet backed up–data that you absolutely cannot afford to lose–please make time during your hurricane preparations to back up your data. As stated in our Storage Policy, we do our best to protect user data, but users are ultimately responsible for keeping their data safe.

We appreciate your understanding, and we wish that you all stay safe during this major weather event.