COVID-19
The Federal Council’s decision to terminate the special situation with effect from the end of March means that ETH Zurich can resume normal operations. As of tomorrow, 1 April 2022, the Executive Board is therefore withdrawing all pandemic regulations set out in the current master plan.
Introduction
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease was first identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since spread globally, resulting in the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic. Switzerland is in an extraordinary situation. The number of cases is increasing rapidly. The entire population is affected and urgently called upon to take responsibility. To limit the number of severe cases of the disease and prevent our healthcare system from being overloaded, we need to act together.
Situation at ETH
As announced by President Joël Mesot in the evening of March 16 (see email), ETH will be operating in a state of emergency for at least 2.5 months starting today. Most employees are required to work from home. Since all school and day-care facilities are closed, many employees need to take care of their kids during the day, which reduces the time that they can spend on their normal work.
Cluster operation
This situation also affects the Cluster Support team. Given the constraints of home office and the limited manpower at our disposal, our first priority is to keep Euler and Leonhard running as best and as long as we can. All other tasks will have to take a back seat. According to the state of emergency rules of ETH, all non-essential activities, including the procurement and installation of new compute nodes and hardware upgrades, will be postponed indefinitely. Support requests for new software installations will be handled on a best-effort basis.
We will reevaluate the situation regularly and update this page if there is any change to the operation of Euler and/or Leonhard.
Updates
- 2020-03-17 12:00
- Since this morning, the whole Cluster Support team is working from home.
- According to the state of emergency rules, access to the data centers is only allowed for mission-critical work. All other hardware work is postponed indefinitely.
- At this time both the Euler and the Leonhard clusters are operating normally.
- 2020-05-07 15:30
- Since the start of the lockdown the number of tickets submitted to cluster-support has increased by 50%. We kindly ask for your patience as the response time may increase as well.
