Following up on some work that was originally planned for October, but was postponed to allow for more testing, we will be performing several system changes and updates.
On Thursday, December 15th, at 9am, we will be taking the system down in order to do the following:
- Re-base and re-install all compute resources to Scientific Linux 6. This brings with it the following benefits:
- Numerous bug fixes and performance improvements
- Updated InfiniBand stack for additional performance improvements
- cgroup support which allows administrators to better isolate and segregate applications from one another, allowing more efficient allocation of system resources for users
- Re-base and re-install login resources to RedHat Enterprise Linux 6. The same benefits that apply to the computational resources will apply here as well.
- Point all systems to new server locations for
- /home
- /opt
- /home/shares
This change will involve
- Migrating those paths from their current NFS mounts to new GlusterFS mount points
- Moving /home/shares to /shares
- Moving /opt/apps to /apps
- Corresponding changes to module files so that, hopefully, most users don’t even notice the changes
The reasons for these changes are as follows
- A GlusterFS configuration for /home, /apps, and /shares will be significantly less complex and more scalable than the current NFS/DRBD configuration, resulting in fewer outages, easier supportability for our staff, and enhanced performance
- Providing a seamless, single view of the filesystems for our Tampa resources and our soon-to-be-released Winter Haven resources required us to use a different approach to making files available and necessitates this change
- The mount-point location changes (/home/shares -> /shares, /opt/apps -> /apps) are also to simplify configuration and to be more in-line with how other centers configure their systems
The system should be available for use by end-of-day Friday after which we will be working to make available a new set of computational resources over the following week. Please let us know if there are any questions and concerns regarding this change.