[Halld-offline] Fwd: JLab Farm Upgrade to AlmaLinux 9

[Alexander Austregesilo]

Dear Colleagues,


Please find new info on the ongoing upgrade of the JLab computing farm 
attached to this mail.


If you use our launch scripts to submit jobs to the farm via swif2, you 
can select the operating system with the OS parameter ("general" still 
points to the CentOS7 nodes):

> OS                            el9
In slurm, you can use this option:
> --constraint=el9
Both of these will land you on one of the few already migrated nodes 
(ifarm16XXXX).

Of course, the software you specify in your environment has to be 
compiled with Alma9. For the official software version, this is the case 
since the current default version_5.15.0.xml

As /u/scratch will disappear, we have to move our nightly-builds and a 
few other automated proceedures elsewhere. I will inform you about this 
in a separate email.

Please report any problems or discrepancies here.

Best regards,
Alex


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[Jlab-scicomp-briefs] JLab Farm Upgrade to AlmaLinux 9
Date: 	Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:28:55 +0000
From: 	Bryan Hess via Jlab-scicomp-briefs <jlab-scicomp-briefs at jlab.org>
Reply-To: 	Bryan Hess <bhess at jlab.org>
To: 	jlab-scicomp-briefs at jlab.org <jlab-scicomp-briefs at jlab.org>



*Farm Upgrade to AlmaLinux 9 *

The Jefferson Lab computing farm is being upgraded from CentOS 7 to 
AlmaLinux 9 in the coming months. This document outlines changes to the 
environment for all users of the interactive login nodes (ifarm), SLURM, 
and SWIF.

*Farm Upgrade Schedule and Worker Node Selection*

The farm is being upgraded in a series of steps. Between now and June, 
the farm composition will change from majority CentOS 7 to predominantly 
AlmaLinux 9. At the time of this writing, CentOS 7 is the default. This 
default will change at a later step in the conversion process. Users may 
currently select which nodes run their jobs using Slurm 
/features/constraints/. This article 
<https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0015330>provides 
details on feature-based node selection. SWIF can pass features through 
to Slurm. See the SWIF introduction 
<https://scicomp.jlab.org/docs/swif2>and SWIF command line reference 
<https://scicomp.jlab.org/cli/swif.html>for details.

The interactive (ifarm) nodes currently run CentOS 7. A new machine, 
ifarm9.jlab.org is available for AlmaLinux 9 use now. Two new ifarm 
machines that will run AlmaLinux 9 are on order. They will replace the 
existing ifarm machines and include more per-core memory and temporary 
disk space.

*Software Environment and Filesystem Changes*

The use of /apps is deprecated and is not available on farm AlmaLinux 9 
machines. CVMFS is now used to distribute software. It is rooted under 
OASIS and can be used with modulefiles 
<https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0014671>as 
before. For questions about software package availability, please submit 
a ServiceNow incident. For hall-specific software distribution 
questions, contact your computing coordinator 
<https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0014686>. 


The legacy /site area has been removed. The path to Jasmine (tape) and 
cache tools will change from /site/bin to /usr/local/bin. The CUE 
/u/scratch area has also been removed.

*Remote Access for Visual Studio Code and SSH*

If you use Visual Studio Code for development and connect it to the 
ifarm hosts using the Remote-SSH extension, you may be aware that the 
current version has dropped support for CentOS 7 remote ends. Since 
AlmaLinux 9 has the newer system software required, you can use ifarm9 
as the remote host instead. This guide to using SSH 
<https://jlab.servicenowservices.com/scicomp?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0014918>with 
the farm includes VS Code details at the end.

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