T2B News

[14/10/2024] New OS supported: AlmaLinux 9 (EL9)

As of June 2024, the current OS on the cluster, Centos 7 (EL7), is not supported anymore, ie does not receive any new security patch.
We have therefore started the migration to an EL9 variant, AlmaLinux 9.

!! We ask you that you start migrating your workflows to EL9 as at some point we will decommission all EL7 related services !!

We will have a transition period where you can access both versions of the OS:

• 4 mX machines in EL7:
  • m0 & m1 (mlong), big hardware machines with 5h of CPU time and 56 cores
  • m2 & m3 (mshort), virtual machines with 20min of CPU time, only meant for coding

• 3 mX machines in EL9:
  • m9, big hardware machines with 5h of CPU time and 56 cores
  • m10 & m11, virtual machines with 20min of CPU time, only meant for coding

Note that this is emphasized in the "message of the day" when connecting via ssh.

The batch system also has now ~3000 slots in EL9, and we will continue migrating compute nodes.
Please be patient as your jobs might spend more time in queue until transition is over.
We will monitor and slowly give EL9 more resources with time.

Note that to submit jobs to EL9 compute nodes, all you have to do is do so from the EL9 mX machines.
All mX machines automatically append their OS version to your job as requirement for both EL7 & EL9, eg:

TARGET.OpSysMajorVer == 9

and talk to a different scheduler, schedd02 for EL7 mX and schedd03 for EL9.

You just have to be careful and adapt what you source for your environment.
Note that containers will still available if you need to use workflows in EL7, even on EL9 machines.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or encounter problems !

[23/10/2024] new policies on mX machines: daily reboots and VSCode usage

In view of the recurrent slowness of some mX machines, along with their heavy usage, we will set some new policies.

1/ ALL mX machines will be rebooted every day at 5AM Brussels Time. If you need to have processes that last longer, use the batch system.

2/ VSCode has seen an increase in usage. Unfortunately, it seems to be heavy on usage resources, making some mX machines (eg m2 / m3) nearly unusable when several users open VSCode sessions. Therefore any VSCode connection now has to go through only m0, m1 or m9. Starting next week, we will just kill any instance found on m2, m3, m10, m11.

3/ mX machines are being reshuffled, with more coming to provide the new EL9 OS. For now, m10 & m11 can be used to test EL9 code deployment and edit code. No EL9 resources are deployed yet in the batch system, so jobs sent from m10 or m11 will just stay idle. More news on this will be coming in the following week(s)

4/ Those policies are on a trial phase, and might be adapted in the future. We welcome any comments or ideas on the situation !

[22/05/2017] Retirement of the mon.iihe.ac.be service

We are retiring the server mon.iihe.ac.be . To get access to the services previously hosted on mon, please use the following new links:

• Jobview : http://mon.iihe.ac.be/jobview/ ==> http://jobview.iihe.ac.be

• Your user dir : http://mon.iihe.ac.be/~USERNAME ==> http://homepage.iihe.ac.be/~USERNAME , (http://mon.iihe.ac.be/~USERNAME will continue working for a while and redirect to the new server)

If something is missing or you have issues, please contact us !