RHEL-9 Migration

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

1. 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:

1. What are exact version changes?

1. How to access the new cluster?

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