Qlustar 10.1 adds CentOS/OpenHPC support

The Qlustar team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Qlustar 10.1 for download. Adding support for CentOS 7.5 as a new fully supported edge platform, combined with the integration of OpenHPC, this release marks an important milestone in Qlustar's history. Qlustar users now have the option to run the most popular HPC platform with the same ease-of-use they're familiar with from our Debian/Ubuntu based platform.

The second big new feature of 10.1 is a totally revamped boot process of Qlustar nodes: QluMan 10.1 now supports downloading the OS image via a fast and fault-tolerant multi-cast mechanism. This can reduce boot-time dramatically and allows for simultaneous and reliable booting of a virtually unlimited number of cluster nodes without increasing overall boot-time.

On top of that, Qlustar OS images are now created using squashfs with compression. This reduces the memory footprint of the OS by roughly 66% so that a standard compute node image with slurm and IB support consumes a mere 160MB of RAM.

Qlustar 10.1 is a feature release with its core still based on Ubuntu/Xenial (16.04). Highlights among the various major component updates include Kernel 4.14.x, Slurm 17.11.9.2, CUDA 9.1 and Lustre 2.11. Please read the release notes for more details.