OS-Upgrade of Alex from AlmaLinux8 to AlmaLinux9

Throughout the month of May, Alex will be gradually upgraded from AlmaLinux 8 to AlmaLinux 9.

In addition to the operating system itself, most development and application software is updated to current versions.

Testing the AlmaLinux9 environment

To already test the new software environment now, proceed as follows:

1. On the Alex login nodes run ssh -p 22922 alex which will take you to a virtual login node with the new software stack (but currently still the old Linux kernel — but that should not matter in almost all cases).
   (You can of course also extend your local ssh_config to include the port and directly connect to the virtual login node.)
2. Some A40 and A100/40GB nodes have already been migrated. More nodes will be migrated step be step.
   You can request these already migrated nodes by adding an additional -C el9 (or --constraint=el9) to your Slurm commands.
   If your Slurm commands already contain a constraint, you must connect all constraints with &; giving multiple individual -C options will not work.

Planned schedule (as of April 29th)

Provided no major issues are reported in the first two weeks of May, the physical login nodes will be reinstalled with AlmaLinux9 in calendar week 21 (May 18–22). During re-installation of the login nodes, there will be limited connection to Alex for some hours.

At the same time, the default for jobs will be changed to the new AlmaLinux9 environment by automatically adding el9 to all jobs without an own OS constraint.

Until the end of May, some compute nodes will still be available via -C el8 with AlmaLinux 8 and the previous software environment. However, login nodes running AlmaLinux 8 will likely no longer be available after this date.

By June 1 at the latest, all compute nodes are scheduled to be migrated to AlmaLinux 9, meaning the option to access the old environment via -C el8 will no longer be available.

Further updates

This post will be updated regularly as needed.

FAQs & news

• Finding hidden modules
  module spider [pattern] can be used to find hidden modules.
• VASP with online license check
  The new VASP binaries are compiled with an online license check. Follow the instructions given on module load vasp. The license certificate has to be renewed every 3 months.
• Capacity quota for /anvme workspaces introduced
  /anvme is regularly running out of space. We therefore have to introduce capacity limits on the group and user level in addition to the already existing inode limits.
• Longer waiting times
  Longer waiting times are expected as Alex is temporarily split into two clusters (still AlmaLinux8 and already AlmaLinux9). Thus, the number of nodes of a specific flavor is reduced, automatically resulting in longer waiting times.
  As people probably take some time adapting to AlmaLinux9, the early bird has good chances to get empty AlmaLinux9 nodes despite their initially limited number.