Every Monday afternoon, a committee convenes to determine if maintenance will be performed. If so, a Message of the Day will be posted and available for review upon login. If not, the reservation will be released and no message will be posted. Additionally, the system may be down periodically for software and hardware upgrades at other times. Users are usually notified of such times in advance by e-mail and by the login banner.
Unscheduled downtimes are unusual but do occur.
In such cases, notification to users may not be possible. User jobs which are running when downtime occurs will be terminated. No checkpointing is performed by the system. Implementing checkpoint and restart capability must be done by users within their codes. US communications can only be conducted over the high performance switch.