As many of you have noticed, the servers that run this discussion forum were down for much of this past weekend (August 18-20). This forum runs on the Xolas cluster of Sun multiprocessor machines hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science. Sometime on Friday night, there was a power failure at LCS that took down a third of the Xolas cluster, which happened to include the two machines used for the LUSENET system.

There really isn't much that can be done to prevent this kind of thing in the future, except move the machines hosting the forum to a new facility with better power, and according to ArsDigita, this is exactly what they're planning to do sometime in the near future. I'll keep everyone posted as to when that's supposed to happen, but in theory, the switch should be more or less transparent, save for an hour or so of downtime.

Meanwhile, the system has been restored to its rightful operating status -- the computer scientists can go back to their experiments with Cilk, the physical scientsts can go back to modelling the real world, and the rest of you can continue passing notes to each other.

-- Mike Sugimoto (phloem@fumbling.com), August 20, 2000