Upgrade of Hydra login nodes to Rocky 9

On Tuesday, December 2, at 03:00 (CET), we will upgrade the login nodes to Rocky Linux 9. During this intervention, access to the terminal interface of Hydra (login.hpc.vub.be) will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes. Running and queued jobs will not be impacted.

Once the upgrade is complete, the system on the login nodes will be on the same version as the rest of the cluster. Hence, the user experience on the login nodes will be consistent with the compute nodes. Users can expect the same behaviour of any commands executed on the shell and in their scripts.

Moreover, loading software modules on the login nodes will now be possible for all modules, including those in the most recent generations as well as modules for GPU software. The purpose of the login nodes does not change though, software in those modules should only be used for light tasks and light testing. Users needing extensive testing should use the test queues in the Anansi cluster, which are configured for interactive use and have dedicated GPU devices for testing such workloads.

Contact us at VUB-HPC Support if you have any comments or questions about these changes.