Pawsey’s business response to COVID-19

Pawsey Executive Director, Mark Stickells, together with his leadership team want to make the community aware of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre’s business response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The intent is to keep the Pawsey community informed and up to date with the actions that the Centre is taking on the situation that the world is currently facing.

In line with advice from CSIRO, State and Federal Governments, the team at Pawsey immediately limited non-essential engagements and events, this includes face-to-face meetings. Instead, Pawsey staff will be incorporating remote options for all internal and external meetings.

Other infection control measures including social distancing and increased hygiene have also been implemented. All Pawsey staff are also preparing for widespread working from home (WFH).

If a site shutdown is deemed necessary and a widespread WFH scenario is implemented, we will notify users that the Centre will be running in asset preservation mode until further notice. This means our systems will remain operational, but in the event of a general loss of community network connectivity, you may be unable to interact with the facility, including its infrastructure.

Should technical issues occur during the site shutdown period, where possible, staff will continue to provide support, investigate and/or resolve problems. Please be aware that some issues may not be fixable remotely and therefore they may not be resolved until normal support services are resumed. Correspondingly, we thank you for your patience during these extraordinary times.

Support
The Pawsey Helpdesk Team will continue to be your first point of contact during this time. The Helpdesk Team is available during business hours (Monday-Friday 9 am – 5 pm AWST, excluding WA’s public holidays) and is a single point of contact for getting in touch with Pawsey, and they will ensure your request gets into the hands of the right person to action it.

If you are experiencing issues, need assistance with any of our services, or need support for your environments, please contact the Pawsey Helpdesk Team:

Email: help@pawsey.org.au
Website: www.support.pawsey.org.au

In addition, Pawsey staff are also investigating the delivery of our training and engagement initiatives online to support the continuation of these services and minimise disruption.

Further news
During March Pawsey staff successfully completed a full site shutdown and maintenance, and have recently launched a new research cloud service.  We are continuing to progress our tender evaluations for the new Pawsey Supercomputing System and assess the impact of any COVID-19 related delays on procurements and installations already underway.

As developments occur, we will update our community via email communications such as this, Pawsey’s website and Twitter, please monitor these channels for full updates.

We are very optimistic about Pawsey’s future and most importantly, we are grateful for your continued support during this challenging time.