CentOS 8 support has arrived

CentOS 8 support has arrived

CentOS 8 support is now available as a third Qlustar edge-platform and was published together with the latest security updates. It comes with the same functionality as our CentOS 7 port which includes out of the box OpenHPC 1.3.9 integration, Slurm 18.8.x, up-to-date Nvidia 340.x drivers, Lustre client and BeeGFS client.

Making your compute nodes switch to CentOS 8 on an existing Qlustar cluster installation is extremely simple: First create a CentOS 8 chroot optionally adding OpenHPC base support, then generate a CentOS 8 OS image selecting the modules you require and finally a boot config using the just generated image. After assigning this boot config to the nodes you want to run it on, you just need to reboot them and voilà your CentOS 8 nodes are ready to be used.

Note that OpenHPC 1.3.9 was originally built for CentOS 7.7. We had to make a few adjustments to make the OpenHPC parts relevant to Qlustar (compilers, MPIs, library packages and applications) work for CentOS 8. The OpenHPC test-suite was run successfully against these components. Once OpenHPC 2.0 will be out, we'll publish instructions to update to it. This will be straightforward.

Additional improvements with this release: Updates to the latest Lustre 2.12.4 LTS release and the newest Nvidia graphics drivers 340.64 adding support for the latest Nvidia GPUs. These two updates apply to all Qlustar 11.0 platforms (Ubuntu 18.04 and CentOS 7/8).