DLC Campus Power Feed Changes 10/27-11/3/2021

Day/Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2021, through Wednesday, November 3, 2021 

Service Affected: Possible power interruptions 

Details:

Between October 27th and November 3rd, 2021, Duquesne Light Company (DLC) will reduce the number of feeds providing power to campus buildings to one active connection per building.  

Please Note: These dates may be changed by DLC. This page will be updated with any changes.

Risks: 

If there is a power interruption during this time, affected buildings will experience an extended power outage while FMS crews manually switch to an alternate feed on a per building basis.  

Please Note: This project does not affect buildings located on South Craig Street or the TCS building. Machines in the SCS Machine Room located in the Gates building are protected by a UPS and Generator and will not be affected by this project.   

Recommendations: 

SCS Computing Facilities (SCSCF) has evaluated the risks and we recommend the following strategies to minimize the potential impact of a power interruption. 

HPC Clusters 

• For HPC clusters in the Wean Machine room and other departmentally managed locations, we recommend people adjust their processing tasks so that they checkpoint their progress regularly. If that is not an option, people should shrink the duration of their computational jobs so that the amount of work lost if power gets interrupted is minimized. 
• For analytical tasks related to conference submissions or similar tasks, we recommend that people copy their analytical data off the HPC environments so that they can generate reports and papers without direct access to the HPC environments. 

Servers 

• For servers in labs, mini-machine rooms, or the SCS Wean Hall data center, we recommend that people identify critical files to which they need continuous immediate access. Those files should be copied onto more reliable locations like Box or Google Drive. 

Desktops/Workstations 

• CrashPlan
  • Desktops and workstations should be enrolled in CrashPlan. This will permit people to access the backup copies of their data remotely even if their on-campus systems are powered off. To enroll in CrashPlan, visit https://rams.srv.cs.cmu.edu/equip-update to register your SCS computer for CrashPlan Data Protection in the Service Updates section.  

• No Backup or Data Protection Service
  • For machines that are not enrolled in a backup or data protection service, we recommend you make copies of any critical files which you cannot afford to lose access to for more than 24 hours. Box and Google Drive are reasonable locations for most files of this type. 

If you have questions about Crashplan or registering your computer for services, please contact the SCS Help Desk at 412-268-4231 or submit a ticket.