Bell Cluster Maintenance
Link to update at March 5, 2025 6:39pm EST UPDATE:
As of 6:30pm, we have concluded main OS upgrade on Bell and you can now login and submit jobs to the scheduler. Open OnDemand (Gateway) users may experience some issues while using MATLAB or STATA/SE interactive apps. Please login Bell gateway to check available workarounds while we are still working on the fix.
As a reminder, this maintenance involved a major operating system upgrade, and the available software on Bell has changed. Please be sure to double check the module versions your job scripts are loading and rebuild your workflow if necessary.
If you have any questions regarding this maintenance, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.
Link to update at March 5, 2025 4:44pm EST UPDATE:
As of 4:44pm, we are wrapping up some final items before bringing Bell back online. We will provide another update by 8pm.
Link to original posting ORIGINAL:
The Bell cluster is scheduled for maintenance and will be unavailable on Tuesday, March 4th, 2025 at 8:00am EST through Wednesday, March 5th, 2025 at 5:00pm EST. During this maintenance, Bell will have its software stack modernized.
What is being upgraded?
During this maintenance, Bell's operating system will be upgraded from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8. This means that the system libraries on Bell will be updated, in some cases by multiple versions, and the applications, libraries, and compilers provided by RCAC through the "module" command will be upgraded. Other user experiences such as SSH, web access, and job scheduling will remain unchanged.
How does this affect you?
- Bell cluster will be unavailable during the maintenance window.
- Slurm jobs that are still queued when this maintenance begins on Tuesday, March 4th, 2024 at 8:00am EST will be deleted.
- A reservation will be created that will prevent jobs from starting if their end time would take the job past the start of maintenance. Because pending jobs will be deleted, these jobs will never run.
- Any applications you have built against the system libraries that are being replaced may need to be recompiled. This may include applications you did not explicitly build yourself such as your R and Python environments.
- The "anaconda" modules will be replaced with a "conda" module. This "conda" module will expose the same "conda" interface you are familiar with, however it will install your packages through different channels than Anaconda.
- User files will persist through the upgrade.
How can you prepare for these changes?
In order to minimize disruption in researcher workflows, we will make a subset of test nodes running the new application stack available during the week leading up to the maintenance. These nodes can be used to re-build your applications and environments against the upgraded Bell image prior to maintenance so that you can resume your work as quickly as possible. We will provide updates when those nodes are ready to be tested by users.
If you have questions about this upgrade or need help from our support staff, please reach out to us at rcac-help@purdue.edu.