OIT Planned Maintenance: Oscar High Performance Computing 1/12 - 1/15

Scheduled Maintenance Report for Brown University

Completed

The scheduled maintenance has been completed.
Posted Jan 13, 2026 - 14:57 EST

In progress

Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.
Posted Jan 12, 2026 - 12:30 EST

Scheduled

Oscar will be unavailable for during the annual downtime for maintenance. Please see below for details.

Maintenance Window
Start: 1/12/2026 6:00 am EST
End: 1/15/2026 6:00 am EST


Maintenance Description
- The OS will be upgraded from RHEL/9.2 to RHEL/9.6.
- The bigmem partition will be decommissioned.
- Oscar modules system will be upgraded.

Expected Impact
- All Oscar services will be unavailable during the downtime
- Jobs which won’t complete by the beginning of the maintenance window won’t start and ‘myq/squeue’ will report (ReqNodeNotAvail, Reserved for maintenance)
- The Open OnDemand (OOD) interface will be different.
- New modules will replace current modules.
- Users will no longer be able to submit jobs to the bigmem partition. Users could get an HPC priority account to submit bigmem jobs to the batch partition that has nodes of 1.5TB memory.

Instructions for Users
- Users will need to resubmit jobs after the maintenance
- Users will need to update their job submission scripts since Oscar module names will be different in the new module system.
- Locally installed packages/environments may not work after the maintenance due to OS upgrade. Users may need to reinstall the packages/environments.
Posted Jan 12, 2026 - 12:20 EST
This scheduled maintenance affected: Research (Oscar High Performance Computing).