[Krypton-users] Krypton compute nodes updated to CentOS 6.3

[Kent Engström]

Dear Krypton Pilot Testers,

as I write this, the Krypton compute nodes are being rebooted to a new
node image. That is, idle nodes are already rebooted and the busy ones
will be rebooted as soon as they become idle.

We have done some testing, but you might still want to verify that your
code still works and has the same performance as before the switch.

We will probably update the login node and the system server next week.

   - o ~ o -

Tech. background for those who want to know more:

We started the pilot test phase running CentOS 6.2.  On Tuesday this
week, CentOS 6.3 was released. We need to follow the release train, as
there are no "backported" fixes for bugs, security holes etc for CentOS
6.2 when 6.3 has been released.

To make it more interesting, with CentOS 6.2 we used Mellanox OFED (the
basic InfiniBand support) as the built-in OFED in CentOS 6.2 did not
have support for our hardware. Now, there is support for that in CentOS
6.3, while we are still waiting for the Mellanox OFED to be updated so
that it supports CentOS 6.3. Thus, the new CentOS 6.3 node image uses
the built-in OFED. It seems to work OK in our tests, but as stated
above, some more testing would be good.

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