One more present from Santa - Qlustar 13

The Qlustar team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Qlustar 13 for download. It updates Qlustar’s core platform to current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The AlmaLinux edge platform remains based on 8.6 while CentOS 7 is still supported via Qlustar 12 images and the new cross-version compatibility.

The highlights of this release are the addition of BMC hardware management via IPMI/Redfish in QluMan, the integration of Spack as the new HPC package manager and the cross-version compatibility between Qlustar releases.

QluMan’s new BMC hardware management support allows for BMC authentification management, power control of nodes via IPMI or Redfish, the display of BIOS settings as well as their validation and correction. A cumulative problem report showing an overview of cluster node misconfigurations has also been added to QluMan.

Spack has been introduced as the new package manager for HPC related application software beyond the so-called Qlustar HPC core stack. It offers a huge list of supported software packages and by design provides hardware optimized versions of them.

The HPC core stack is a new component definition within Qlustar and is related to the introduction of Spack. Rather than aiming to provide as much HPC functionality as possible by OS packages (debs/rpms), the HPC core stack now makes a clear cut between Qlustar related system software which remains provided as OS packages and HPC application software.

Starting with this release, cross-version compatibility between the current and the previous Qlustar release has been added. In practice this means, that on a cluster with a Qlustar 13 head-node you can still run nodes with Qlustar 12 images/chroots and vice versa. This new feature was added to allow even smoother release upgrades.

Highlights among the various major component updates include Kernel 5.15.x, Slurm 22.05.x, Lustre 2.15.1, ZFS 2.1.6 and BeeGFS 7.3.2. Please read the release notes for more details.