RHEL-9 Migration

Higher Throughput, More Secure, and Greener Computing!"

1. What is the reason for this maintenance?

   Oscar's current operating system, RHEL-7, and its maintenance support phase will come to an end in June 2024. So Oscar is being upgraded to latest RedHat Enterprise Linux RHEL-9.2

   Due to the new kernel and glibc majority of applications will break.

2. We are also introducing a bunch of new features:

   • Upgraded OS - The OS has been upgraded with a newer kernel and improved security patches

   • Power Saving Mode: In the batch partition, idle nodes now enter a power-saving mode, consuming only about 40W. They seamlessly transition to high-performance mode just before job execution begins

   • GPU Direct Storage: GDS enables a direct data path for direct memory access (DMA) transfers between GPU memory and storage, which avoids a bounce buffer through the CPU. This direct path increases system bandwidth and decreases the latency and utilization load on the CPU

   • SLURM Upgrade: We have tuned the scheduler to provide much higher throughput. Now supports json and yaml formatting for all slurm commands

   • SPACK & LMOD - Newer industry standard for installing and managing applications on Oscar. We now support multple shells bash,zsh & fish etc

   • Increased-core core count for GPU accounts:

   Account	Partition	Current core-limit	New core-limit
   Exploratory	gpu	4-cores	12-cores
   Standard GPU Priority	gpu	16-cores	24-cores
   Standard GPU Priority+	gpu	32-cores	48-cores
   High-End GPU Priority	gpu-he	16-cores	24-cores

   

   Idle nodes enter power saving mode automatically

   

   Unified Storage across all OIT data platforms

   

   GPUDirect Storage - Lower laency & Higher Bandwidth for IO
3. What are exact version changes?

   Component	Current Version	New Version
   Operating System	RHEL-7.9	RHEL-9.2
   Kernel	3.10.0-1160.76.1	5.14.0-284.11.1
   GLIBC	2.17-326	2.34-60
   SLURM	22.05.7	23.02.6
   Nvidia Driver	535.54.03	535.113.01
   Package Manager	PyModules	SPACK

4. How to access the new cluster?

   We will provide detailed instructions in coming weeks. Thank you for your patience.