January 2026 Maintenance¶

COMPLETE: Planned Datacentre Outage – January 2026¶

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:description: Planned datacentre outage impacting the Aoraki research compute cluster and hosted research services. :keywords: Aoraki, datacentre outage, maintenance, HPC, Open OnDemand, SLURM :Published: 16 December 2025

The Research Computing team advises users of a planned datacentre outage that will impact the Aoraki research compute cluster and several associated research services.

This outage is required to support scheduled electrical maintenance and will involve a complete power shutdown of the 325 Datacentre.

Outage Window¶

Important

Start: 12:00 pm, Friday 16 January 2026 End: 5:00 pm, Monday 19 January 2026 Timezone: NZDT

All systems hosted in the datacentre will be unavailable for the duration of this window.

Services Impacted¶

The following services will be unavailable during the outage:

Aoraki high-performance compute cluster (login nodes and compute nodes)
SLURM job scheduling and submission services
Virtual machines hosted in the datacentre
On-site storage services
Web portals and research platforms hosted in the datacentre
Departmental servers hosted in the datacentre
Open OnDemand and hosted applications (including CryoSPARC)

What Users Need to Do¶

Warning

Ensure all running jobs complete before the outage begins.
Avoid scheduling long-running or critical workflows during this period.
New SLURM job submissions will be disabled ahead of the outage.
No user access or actions will be possible during the outage.

Users should plan workflows accordingly to avoid disruption.

What We Will Do¶

Research Computing team will:

Drain the Aoraki cluster in advance of the outage.
Perform a controlled shutdown of all affected systems.
Coordinate with Facilities during the power outage.
Restore services in a staged and validated manner once power is returned.

Service restoration will begin as soon as it is safe to do so after power is restored.