[Updated] Major upgrade of Colossus 2024-06-10 07:00 to 2024-06-14 20:00

The operating system (OS) on Colossus will be upgraded starting Monday June 10th. This is a major upgrade, and will take one week. During the upgrade, Colossus will be unavailable.

The main reason for the upgrade is that the current OS is very old, and soon will soon reach end of life.

During the downtime, we will reorganize the cluster, upgrade the networking and upgrade the OS from CentOS7 to Rocky9. Rocky, like CentOS, is a RedHat clone.

After the upgrade, you will most likely have to recompile any software that you have installed on the submit hosts today (e.g. R packages). If possible, the Linux RedHat9 submit hosts will be made available a little before the rest, so you can start testing and reinstalling software.

The software stack available via "module load" will be reinstalled. We will install toolchain 2021a and newer. This means that not all
old versions of all software will be available after the upgrade. If you use software older than this, please start using newer versions, if
possible.

When the upgrade is done, Colossus will still run the same "flavour" of Linux (RedHat) as now, so you should be able to work mostly as you do today.  However, a few commands may have changed or
work differently, so you will probably have to do some changes.

During the downtime, please follow this operational log.

Update 2024-05-10: Downtime postponed from 2024-05-27 to 2024-06-10.