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Halstead Upgrade to CentOS7

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In order to continue to offer a current computational platform for research at Purdue, Halstead is going to receive a complete upgrade to CentOS7 - the Community Development Platform for the Red Hat family of Linux distributions. CentOS7 is just one version ahead of what Halstead currently runs (RHEL6), and all our ssh, Thinlinc, and job scheduling will remain largely unchanged. However, many system libraries will shift versions forward, and the applications, libraries, and compilers provided by Research Computing through the "module" command will also all see changes.

Halstead is currently scheduled to fully upgrade on Monday, May 14th, 2018.

To provide everyone with an opportunity to test their code and applications on the new CentOS7 environment in advance, we are now opening access to a small portion of the Halstead cluster which has already been upgraded to CentOS7. If you have compiled your own applications on Halstead, we strongly urge you to recompile them for CentOS7.

To access the new test environment, log in to "halstead7.rcac.purdue.edu" via ssh from either your own computer or a Thinlinc session on desktop.halstead.rcac.purdue.edu. This will log you in to a CentOS7 front-end submission host. From there, you may submit to the new "halstead7" queue, which will direct your jobs to a small pool of CentOS7 nodes.

There is currently a 24-hour maximum time limit on jobs, and we ask everyone to please use this queue ONLY for testing your code and applications. Do NOT run your normal research work through this queue. This queue is very limited in size, and we want to ensure everyone has ready access to it for testing purposes.

We are also still very much in the process of working out kinks with this new environment, so expect changes to continue there as we fill in missing pieces. If you see anything missing necessary for your work, please email us at rcac-help@purdue.edu so we can address it.

We hope this early access to the new environment will allow for a much smoother transition for you and your work when Halstead is fully upgraded on Monday, May 14th, 2018. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you!

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