IT Center Changes

As announced, the old CentOS software stack will reach its end of life on April, 30th. Beginning with May 2nd, this means the following:

• No submission to CentOS nodes will be possible anymore.
• All CLAIX-2018 login / dialog nodes will be migrated to Rocky 8 Linux, lmod and the new software stack.
• Jobs submitted to CentOS nodes before May 1st will be scheduled to the remaining CentOS batch nodes on a best-effort basis, without guarantee for start or completion within the remaining lifetime of those nodes. We strongly recommend to submit all new jobs to the new Rocky 8 environment as of now.

Please find the overview of changes with Rocky Linux 8 here.

You can track any disruptions or security advisories that may occur due to the aforementioned change in the RWTH-HPC category on our status reporting portal.

Due to a hardware failure the dialog system

login2.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de

is no longer usable. Please use the dialog systems from CLAIX18 (Login Nodes) in the future.

You can track any disruptions or security advisories that may occur due to the aforementioned change in the RWTH-HPC category on our status reporting portal.

Starting at April, 18th 2023 the maximum annual CPU quota for RWTH Small (RWTH-S) projects will be increased from 0.24 Mio. Core-h to 0.36 Mio Core-h. Find further information about the application process on our website.

You can track any disruptions or security advisories that may occur due to the aforementioned change in the RWTH-HPC category on our status reporting portal.

Since CentOS 7, the Linux Operating System of CLAIX, is outdated, and since CentOS Linux 8 reached End Of Life (EOL), we have to shift to a new Linux distribution.  We have selected Rocky Linux 8.7, which is also Red Hat Enterprise compatible.

Going hand in hand with this change, we also prepared the shift to a new software environment based on EasyBuild and Lmod. These tools are also widely used at other HPC centers. We expect them to improve the user experience and the maintainability from the administrator’s perspective.

However, for you as a user, both changes require that you

(1.) learn how to use the new module system (e.g., names of the modules changed, toolchains, etc.) and

(2.) recompile your software and

(3.) revise and possibly modify your batch scripts accordingly.

Understanding that you need time to prepare for these changes, we will offer support for the old (CentOS 7) and the new (Rocky Linux 8) environment in parallel for a transition period of approx. 7 weeks, ending on April 30th, 2023. During this period, more and more compute nodes will be migrated to the new environment. Consequently, the waiting times for jobs scheduled to run in the old environment might increase over time.

How to proceed?

During a maintenance on March 8th, 2023 the following login nodes were migrated to the new environment:

• login18-2.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de
• login18-3.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de
• login18-x-2.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de
• login18-g-2.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de
• copy18-2.hpc.itc.rwth-aachen.de

Jobs submitted from these login nodes will automatically be submitted to compute nodes running Rocky 8 and the new module environment. Any batch job submitted from non-migrated login nodes (i.e., not in the list above) will be scheduled to the old environment.

You can use these login nodes in order to test your new workflows, make modifications and get familiar with the new software stack. For an example on how to find software easily with “module spider” in the new module system, please refer here.

Please note: If you would like to use a graphical remote desktop session, ensure you are using FastX 3 (newer version).

We provide an overview on the changes with the transition and a separated branch here about the new module system (including example scripts for different software packages).

You can track any disruptions or security advisories that may occur due to the aforementioned change in the RWTH-HPC category on our status reporting portal.