Marconi100 upgrade March 23/24

Dear Users,

due to a major upgrade of Marconi100 to Red Hat 8.1 OS, an extraordinary maintenance on Marconi100 was scheduled for next week, on Tuesday, March 23. For the complexity of the operations, we expect to bring the cluster back to production within the following day, March 24.

The vast majority of the software offered by the module environment has been tested and appears to be working without any need to be recompiled. In some cases, the upgrade of the system, and specifically of the NVIDIA driver, results in better performances, and in no case we observed a degradation of performance. Please, inform us of any incorrect behaviour you may observe on the installed software after the system upgrade.

A notable difference concerns the use of the XL compilers, the current version (16.1.1) not being compatible to RH 8 OS. At the cluster reopening, the version presented in the base profile will be overridden by the RH 8 compatible 16.1.1 version provided by IBM.

A new version of IBM Spectrum MPI (10.4.0) will also be available in the base profile, and we will accordingly update all the current installations based on Spectrum MPI in the next few weeks. However, as previously mentioned, the software installed with the current version of Spectrum MPI (10.3.1) will keep working in the new environment.

Concerning your personal softwares, even though everything should keep working (unless the XL compilers were used), we recommend to recompile your codes with the new software stack in order to fully exploit the new libraries and drivers available on RH 8 OS.

Best regards,

HPC User Support @ CINECA