[Bi-users] DONE: Login node reboots 3 May at 17:00, node boots ongoing

[Kent Engström]

Bi users,

the login nodes and the system server has now been restarted and you are
welcome back to use the system. The rolling node upgrade has also
completed.


> as discussed with our user representatives on today's followup meeting,
>
> it's time for a new attempt at installing non-broken mitigation for the
> Spectre variant 2 processor security issue (Spectre/Meltdown was the big
> news at the start of the year).
>
> As you might remember, we installed microcode updates in January that we
> had to revert as they turned out to affect system stability. Since then,
> Intel has provided fixed microcode. Also, the latest Red Hat / CentOS
> kernel uses a somewhat different version of the mitigation, with
> Google's "retpoline" software trick as the main component.
>
>
> We do not expect this version to crash jobs like the last attempt, but
> there may be performance impacts. Anyhow, we are interested in feedback
> (especially from those of you who saw problems during January) if you
> see things that are clearly different before and after today's
> change.
>
> The nodes are being updated as they become idle. This means that jobs
> that got started after 16:47 today will run on nodes with the new node
> image.
>
> We will restart the login nodes and the system server next week on
> Thursday 3 May starting at 17:00 CEST.
>
> Best Regards,

-- 
Kent Engström, National Supercomputer Centre
kent at nsc.liu.se, +46 13 28 4444