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Electrical Power and Load Shedding
Unfortunately, the CHPC is subject to load-shedding (under the City of Cape Town) when Eskom has reduced generation.
While the CHPC has a 1000 kVA generator this is not sufficient to power the entire cluster during blackouts and only 10 of the compute racks are available.
Please plan accordingly
Tips
There are steps you can take to make more effective use of the cluster when it is operating at reduced capacity. Many of these are also useful outside of loadshedding events as well.
1. Please check whether each of your jobs is very necessary.
The following will allow your job to start running sooner and remain queued for a shorter time:
2. Choose as short a walltime as appropriate such that your job will have passed and written checkpoint files, so that you can then submit subsequent jobs to continue your calculation. You can also adjust (increase) the frequency of checkpoint file outputs when possible. You can also choose the waltimes according to your working hours and schedule.
