RedHat 9.0 & GPU14 heads up

[Predrag Punosevac]

Dear Autonians,

The short version of this email is that I am planning to offline gpu14 this
Thursday in order to upgrade from RHEL 7.9 to recently released RHEL 9.0.
The GPU node is currently idle. Please don't start jobs as you will lose
them.

If you have 10 minutes, the long version of this email reads:


It has been brought to my attention that some lab members are running into
a problem with glibc library version 2.28 shipped with RHEL 8.6. Currently,
about 50% of our computing nodes run an even older version of RHEL 7.9
which is shipped with 2.17.

RHEL 9.0 was released less than half a year ago. It is shipped with glibc
2.34. GCC 11.2.1 and binutils 2.35.2. The default Python version is 3.9.
The common wisdom is to hold any upgrades until 9.1 release. Due to my
personal connection with the Springdale community (Princeton university),
which provides us with a free clone of RHEL, I know that 9.0 us production
ready. I have already checked the NVidia/CUDA stack and RPMs are built.
Therefore, I decided to schedule an experiment and to try to upgrade gpu14
to RHEL 9.0. If the experiment is successful,  Piotr Bartosiewicz and I
will upgrade all computing nodes currently running RHEL 7.9 to 9.0 release.
Computing nodes and all workstations currently running 8.6 will not be
touched to maintain the usability of the system.

Ubuntu fans should be aware that  22.04 is shipped with glibc 2.35 but GCC
and many other things a minor point releases behind RHEL 9.0. The last time
I looked, CS CMU facilities were upgrading all desktops to Ubuntu 20.04
from 18.04 and earlier. CMU CS facilities don't run Ubuntu on servers and
they are still in crisis mode due to unanticipated termination of the
CentOS clone of RHEL 8.xxx. The last time I talked to Ed Walter they were
running Cent/RHEL 7.9 and thinking about what to do next (Alma Linux, Rocky
Linux as well as what to do with obsolete ROCKS clusters). I did my best to
spare you from those things.

Cheers,
Predrag
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/autonlab-users/attachments/20220927/3fad6a56/attachment.html>