ARC System Changes: 2026-01

ARC systems will be offline for maintenance from 08:00AM on Monday, January 5, 2026 through 5:00PM Thursday, January 8th, 2026. This outage affects all ARC general purpose clusters, storage, and services including:

  • Tinkercliffs, Owl, and Falcon clusters

  • access to these clusters’ login nodes and /home, /projects, and /scratch data

  • ARC’s Open OnDemand web interface for these clusters

  • ColdFront, ARC Dashboards, and ARC Globus services

  • ARC’s LLM services llm.arc.vt.edu and llm-api.arc.vt.edu

Maintenance for the CUI and Biomed clusters is performed at a different time and these resources will remain online during this maintenance.

Most of the scheduled tasks are for regular software and system maintenance which are essential for stablity and system security, but are expected to be transparent to end users. As we finalize the agenda and schedule for the outage, some additional topics may be added here if they will have a noticable impact on cluster usage.

Updates to GPU drivers

Currently all Nvidia GPUs on ARC systems are using the driver version 565.57.01 and we are targeting and update to the 580.x series drivers which will enable the latest CUDA version 13.x and codes which rely on that version.

Minor Reorganization of /scratch directories

Summary of changes

  • the permissions on the root of /scratch will become restricted so that users cannot create or modify that top-level directory

  • ARC will maintain the creation and existence of named-user directories at the next level, for example: /scratch/user is assured to exist and be writable by user

Details and explanation

ARC’s /scratch directories are local to each cluster and provided high-speed, scalable, temporary storage and staging areas for data. The files in each /scratch filesystem which are older than 90 day are subject to automatic deletion. This policy serves to prevent continual growth of resident data associated with “abandoned” files and directories which would otherwise eventually fill the entire storage system.

Currently, /scratch is writable by all users which allows the potential for “collisions” in the case where multiple people attempt to write to the same file at the same time, risks of accidental deletion by others, and general clutter in the top level directory. All of this can be avoided if all users agree to work only in their own subdirectories and so ARC is making this the functional setup of /scratch directories starting in January 2026.