Blog

Due to emergency network maintenance, the network will be temporarily out of service during the following date and times.

Four security issues that require action were published between 20 and 21 October.

1. Leak of intermediate CA keys of the certificate authority eMudhra (emSign)
2. Vulnerability in Node.js
3. Vulnerability in PHP
4. Vulnerability in Apache Tomcat

Several serious security vulnerabilities, including remote code execution (RCE), have been identified in Node.js. To give top priority to avoiding the security risk, we have uninstalled Node.js from the NIG supercomputer.

The regular maintenance of the NIG supercomputer will be carried out during the period stated below, in accordance with the legally mandated power outage at NIG.
The supercomputer will be unavailable throughout the maintenance period.

Contents

1. 13–19 March 2026: Scheduled Maintenance
2. Notice on Billing for the Third Period of 2025

At approximately 10:30 on Thursday, 25 December 2025 (24-hour clock; all times below are shown in 24-hour format), the Slurm management server for the General Analysis Division stopped.

The cause of the issue was insufficient memory on the compute node hosting the Slurm management server.

Recovery procedures were completed at 15:00 on the same day, and job submission has since resumed.

At approximately 13:40 on Friday, 5 September 2025, the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) was struck by a lightning bolt, causing significant damage to the facility’s electrical infrastructure and resulting in a power outage.

As a consequence, the NIG Supercomputer was temporarily rendered unavailable. However, the login service was restored promptly at 12:00 on Tuesday, 9 September 2025. (For those dedicated virtual machines that had not been confirmed to be operational by 12:00 on 9 September, all were successfully restarted by 15:00 on Wednesday, 10 September.)

Repairs to the damaged equipment were completed on Thursday, 6 November 2025. Due to the repair work being close to the weekend, the NIG Supercomputer was scheduled to be offline from 08:30 on Thursday, 6 November 2025, until 09:00 on Monday, 10 November 2025. However, the work proceeded smoothly, and the NIG Supercomputer was restored earlier than planned, by 17:30 on Friday, 7 November 2025.

We would like to inform you that, due to ongoing restoration work related to a lightning strike on Friday, 5th September 2025, which affected the power supply equipment at the National Institute of Genetics, there will be a scheduled power outage on Saturday, 25th October 2025.

As a result of this outage, the supercomputer will be temporarily unavailable during the weekend of 25th October.

Further details regarding the restoration timeline and any potential impacts will be communicated once confirmed.

We would like to inform users that the Rhelixa Graphing Tool (RIAS Visualisation), which has been provided through our collaboration with the National Institute of Genetics, will be discontinued as the underlying system is being decommissioned. The service will end on 31 October 2025 (Friday).

From around 13:40 on Friday, September 5, 2025, a lightning strike associated with a typhoon directly hit NIG, causing a power outage. As a result, the supercomputer executed an automatic shutdown, and the entire NIG supercomputer system was halted. Since this power outage was classified as an electrical accident due to lightning, power restoration required inspection procedures, which prolonged the outage.

Recovery work for the supercomputer began on Monday, September 8, and login services were resumed at 12:00 on Tuesday, September 9, except for some systems. (For dedicated VMs that had not been confirmed to be running as of 12:00 on September 9, all of them were successfully restarted by 15:00 on the same day.)