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SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7

Release Notes

Abstract

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing is a highly-scalable, high-performance open-source operating system designed to utilize the power of parallel computing. This document provides an overview of high-level general features, capabilities, and limitations of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 and important product updates.

These release notes are updated periodically. The latest version of these release notes is always available at https://www.suse.com/releasenotes. General documentation can be found at https://documentation.suse.com/sle-hpc/15-SP7.

Publication Date: 2026-07-09, Version: 15.700000000.20260709

1 About the release notes

These Release Notes are identical across all architectures, and the most recent version is always available online at https://www.suse.com/releasenotes.

Entries are only listed once but they can be referenced in several places if they are important and belong to more than one section.

Release notes usually only list changes that happened between two subsequent releases. Certain important entries from the release notes of previous product versions are repeated. To make these entries easier to identify, they contain a note to that effect.

However, repeated entries are provided as a courtesy only. Therefore, if you are skipping one or more service packs, check the release notes of the skipped service packs as well. If you are only reading the release notes of the current release, you could miss important changes.

2 SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing is a highly scalable, high performance open-source operating system designed to utilize the power of parallel computing for modeling, simulation and advanced analytics workloads.

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 provides tools and libraries related to High Performance Computing. This includes:

  • Workload manager

  • Remote and parallel shells

  • Performance monitoring and measuring tools

  • Serial console monitoring tool

  • Cluster power management tool

  • A tool for discovering the machine hardware topology

  • System monitoring

  • A tool for monitoring memory errors

  • A tool for determining the CPU model and its capabilities (x86-64 only)

  • User-extensible heap manager capable of distinguishing between different kinds of memory (x86-64 only)

  • Serial and parallel computational libraries providing the common standards BLAS, LAPACK, …​

  • Various MPI implementations

  • Serial and parallel libraries for the HDF5 file format

2.1 Hardware Platform Support

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 is available for the Intel 64/AMD64 (x86-64) and AArch64 platforms.

2.2 Important Sections of This Document

If you are upgrading from a previous SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing release, you should review at least the following sections:

2.3 Support and life cycle

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing is backed by award-winning support from SUSE, an established technology leader with a proven history of delivering enterprise-quality support services.

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 has a 13-year life cycle, with 10 years of General Support and 3 years of Extended Support. The current version (SP7) will be fully maintained and supported until 6 months after the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP8.

Any release package is fully maintained and supported until the availability of the next release.

Extended Service Pack Overlay Support (ESPOS) and Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS) are also available for this product. If you need additional time to design, validate and test your upgrade plans, Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS) can extend the support you get by an additional 12 to 36 months in 12-month increments, providing a total of 3 to 5 years of support on any given Service Pack.

For more information, see:

2.4 Support statement for SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing

To receive support, you need an appropriate subscription with SUSE. For more information, see https://www.suse.com/support/programs/subscriptions/?id=SUSE_Linux_Enterprise_Server.

The following definitions apply:

L1

Problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, ongoing maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.

L2

Problem isolation, which means technical support designed to analyze data, reproduce customer problems, isolate problem area and provide a resolution for problems not resolved by Level 1 or prepare for Level 3.

L3

Problem resolution, which means technical support designed to resolve problems by engaging engineering to resolve product defects which have been identified by Level 2 Support.

For contracted customers and partners, SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing is delivered with L3 support for all packages, except for the following:

SUSE will only support the usage of original packages. That is, packages that are unchanged and not recompiled.

2.4.1 Software requiring specific contracts

Certain software delivered as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing may require an external contract. Check the support status of individual packages using the RPM metadata that can be viewed with rpm, zypper, or YaST.

2.4.2 Software under GNU AGPL

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 (and the SUSE Linux Enterprise modules) includes the following software that is shipped only under a GNU AGPL software license:

  • Ghostscript (including subpackages)

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 (and the SUSE Linux Enterprise modules) includes the following software that is shipped under multiple licenses that include a GNU AGPL software license:

  • MySpell dictionaries and LightProof

  • ArgyllCMS

2.5 Documentation and other information

2.5.1 Available on the product media

  • Read the READMEs on the media.

  • Get the detailed change log information about a particular package from the RPM (where FILENAME.rpm is the name of the RPM):

    rpm --changelog -qp FILENAME.rpm
  • Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of the installation medium for a chronological log of all changes made to the updated packages.

  • Find more information in the docu directory of the installation medium of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7. This directory includes PDF versions of the SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 Installation Quick Start Guide.

2.5.2 Online documentation

4 Technology previews

Technology previews are packages, stacks, or features delivered by SUSE which are not supported. They may be functionally incomplete, unstable or in other ways not suitable for production use. They are included for your convenience and give you a chance to test new technologies within an enterprise environment.

Whether a technology preview becomes a fully supported technology later depends on customer and market feedback. Technology previews can be dropped at any time and SUSE does not commit to providing a supported version of such technologies in the future.

Give your SUSE representative feedback about technology previews, including your experience and use case.

4.1 64K page size kernel flavor has been added

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing for Arm 12 SP2 and later kernels have used a page size of 4K. This offers the widest compatibility also for small systems with little RAM, allowing to use Transparent Huge Pages (THP) where large pages make sense.

As a technology preview, SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing for Arm 15 SP7 adds a kernel flavor 64kb, offering a page size of 64 KiB and physical/virtual address size of 52 bits. Same as the default kernel flavor, it does not use preemption.

Main purpose at this time is to allow for side-by-side benchmarking for High Performance Computing, Machine Learning and other Big Data use cases. Contact your SUSE representative if you notice performance gains for your specific workloads.

Important
Important: Swap needs to be re-initialized

After booting the 64K kernel, any swap partitions need to re-initialized to be usable. To do this, run the swapon command with the --fixpgsz parameter on the swap partition. Note that this process deletes data present in the swap partition (for example, suspend data). In this example, the swap partition is on /dev/sdc1:

swapon --fixpgsz /dev/sdc1
Important
Important: Btrfs file system uses page size as block size

It is currently not possible to use Btrfs file systems across page sizes. Block sizes below page size are not yet supported and block sizes above page size might never be supported.

During installation, change the default partitioning proposal and choose another file system, such as Ext4 or XFS, to allow rebooting from the default 4K page size kernel of the Installer into kernel-64kb and back.

See the Storage Guide for a discussion of supported file systems.

Warning
Warning: RAID 5 uses page size as stripe size

It is currently not yet possible to configure stripe size on volume creation. This will lead to sub-optimal performance if page size and block size differ.

Avoid RAID 5 volumes when benchmarking 64K vs. 4K page size kernels.

See the Storage Guide for more information on software RAID.

Note
Note: Cross-architecture compatibility considerations

The SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7 kernels on x86-64 use 4K page size.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing for POWER 15 SP7 kernel uses 64K page size.

5 Modules

5.1 HPC module

The HPC module contains HPC specific packages. These include the workload manager Slurm, the node deployment tool clustduct, munge for user authentication, the remote shell mrsh, the parallel shell pdsh, as well as numerous HPC libraries and frameworks.

It can be added or removed using the YaST UI or the SUSEConnect CLI tool. Refer to the system administration guide for further details.

5.2 NVIDIA Compute Module

The NVIDIA Compute Module provides the NVIDIA CUDA repository for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Note that that any software within this repository is under a 3rd party EULA. For more information check https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/eula/index.html.

This module is not selected for addition by default when installing SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing. It may be selected manually during installation from the Extension and Modules screen. You may also select it on an installed system using YaST. To do so, run from a shell as root yast registration, select: Select Extensions and search for NVIDIA Compute Module and press Next.

Important
Important

Do not attempt to add this module with the SUSEConnect CLI tool. This tool is not yet capable of handling 3rd party repositories.

Once you have selected this module you will be asked to confirm the 3rd party license and verify the repository signing key.

6 Changes affecting all architectures

Information in this section applies to all architectures supported by SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP7.

6.1 SLE HPC no longer a separate product

As of 15 SP7, SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing is no longer a separate product. As a result:

  • the HPC Module can now be enabled in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

  • when migrating from SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP3, SP4, and SP5, only SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6 will be available as migration target. The result of such a migration will be an installation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with all the previously enabled modules.

6.2 Enriched system visibility in the SUSE Customer Center (SCC)

SUSE is committed to helping provide better insights into the consumption of SUSE subscriptions regardless of where they are running or how they are managed; physical or virtual, on-prem or in the cloud, connected to SCC or Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT), or managed by SUSE Manager. To help you identify or filter out systems in SCC that are no longer running or decommissioned, SUSEConnect now features a daily “ping”, which will update system information automatically.

For more details see the documentation at https://documentation.suse.com/subscription/suseconnect/single-html/SLE-suseconnect-visibility/.

6.3 Automatically opened ports

Installing the following packages automatically opens the following ports:

  • dolly - TCP ports 9997 and 9998

  • slurm - TCP ports 6817, 6818, and 6819

Important
Important

These release notes only document changes in SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing compared to the immediate previous service pack of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing. The full changes and fixes can be found on the respective web site of the packages.

6.4 GNU compiler suite version 12

SLE HPC 15 SP7 now supports the GNU compiler suite version 12. To install the runtime environments (environment modules) for version 12, run: zypper install gnu12-compilers-hpc. To install all the packages required for development (C, C and Fortran compilers), run `zypper install gnu12-compilers-hpc-devel`. To load the environment, run 'module load gnu/12' in your shell. When the `-devel` package is installed, the compilers (`gcc-12`, `g-12`, gfortran-12) will become available in this shell under their standard names (gcc, g++, gfortran).

6.5 conman

conman has been updated to version 0.3.1:

  • Fixed username/password use in libipmiconsole.conf.

  • Added -T command-line option to specify terminal emulator.

  • General move of files from /usr/lib/conman to /usr/share/conman.

6.6 dolly

dolly has been updated to version 0.64.2. The tool is less verbose by default and the dolly service can be activated through a socket.

6.7 imb

imb is shipped in version 2021.3:

  • Change default value for mem_alloc_type to device.

  • Added new IMB-MPI1-GPU benchmarks as technical preview.

  • Added -msg_pause option.

  • Changed default window_size from 64 to 256.

  • Added -window_size option for IMB-MPI1.

6.8 memkind

memkind has been updated to version 1.14.0. The full list of changes is available at http://memkind.github.io/memkind/.

6.9 openblas

openblas has been updated to version 0.3.21. It contains performance regression fixes and optimizations. For more information see https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/releases/tag/v0.3.21.

6.10 munge

munge has been updated to version 0.5.15:

  • Fixed systemd service unit configuration to wait until network is online.

  • Fixed sending repeated SIGTERMs to signal stop.

6.11 cpuid

cpuid has been updated to version 20221201.

This update includes:

  • Added and updated identification of many CPU models and variants.

  • Updated hypervisor support.

  • Improved synth information and u-architecture decoding.

6.12 lmod

lmod has been updated to version 8.7.17.

The user visible changes include:

  • Add option --miniConfig to report configuration differences from default.

  • Move cache file location from ~/.lmod.d/.cache/* to ~/.cache/lmod/*

  • Transitional support for using ~/.config/lmod for collections. Currently collect are written to both ~/.lmod.d/ and ~/.config/lmod.

  • setenv and pushenv change local environment when running spider (and avail).

  • Allow bash users to export SUPPORT_KSH=no so that they can avoid bash startup setting FPATH

  • Add --location option to show to write to stderr the file location.

  • Only rebuild spider caches if there are any loaded or pending modules. module avail <name1> <name2> …​ now only prints matching aliases. Search names are resolved.

  • Print dataT table when there is an Exception.

  • New command added: module overview.

  • Add spiderPathFilter hook so that sites can control what paths are kept or ignored.

  • Added $LMOD_SITE_MODULEPATH support to prepend to MODULEPATH

  • Add support for sh_to_modulefile to support zsh, ksh, bash and tcsh with aliases and shell functions

  • Support for source_sh added. Now support more than one shell script per modulefile.

6.13 PAPI

PAPI has been updated to version 7.0.0.

The highlights include:

  • Added "intel_gpu" component with monitoring capabilities support for Intel GPUs, including GPU hardware events and memory performance metrics.

  • Added "sysdetect" component for detecting a machine’s architectural details. Additionally, PAPI offers a new API that enables users to get "sysdetect" details from within their application.

  • A major redesign of the "rocm" component for advanced monitoring features for the latest AMD GPUs. The PAPI "rocm" component is now thread-safe.

  • Support for NVIDIA compute capability 7.0 and greater. This implies support for CUPTI’s new Profiling and Perfworks APIs.

  • Significant redesign of the "sde" component into two separate entities:

    1. a standalone library "libsde" with a new API for software developers to define software-based metrics from within their applications

    2. the PAPI "sde" component that enables monitoring of these new software-based events.

  • New C++ interface for "libsde," which enables software developers to define software-defined events from within their C++ applications.

  • New Counter Analysis Toolkit (CAT) benchmarks and refinements of PAPI’s CAT data analysis.

  • Support for FUGAKU’s A64FX Arm architecture, including monitoring capabilities for memory bandwidth and other node-wide metrics. For futher details check https://bitbucket.org/icl/papi/wiki/PAPI-Releases.md

6.14 warewulf4

warewulf4 is a popular SLE for HPC deployment tool whose latest version is a full rewrite in the Go programming language. It is applying lessons learned from its predecessors. It deploys minimal images which it obtains from container images stored in a registry and performs a minimal configuration for the image to be useful as a compute node image in a cluster. warewulf4 is deprecating the former deployment tool clustduct.

  • Update to version 4.5.8:

  • Warewulf v4.5.8 simplifies the wwinit boot process for SELinux and configures tmpfs to spread the node image across all available NUMA nodes. It also improves the detection of kernels in the container image to more reliably detect the newest available kernel and to avoid debug / rescue kernels.

  • Warewulf v4.5.7 fixes the ability to override overlay files configured in profiles with overlays configured per-node; fixes a template processing bug bug in development-time overlay rendering; and improves the preview dracut-based boot process to better support a secure boot process.

  • added option which allows to copy in file on wwctl container exec and keep them, if they were modified.

  • Update to version 4.5.6 with following changes:

    • Show more information during wwctl container <shell|exec> about when and if the container image will be rebuilt.

    • Command-line completion for wwctl overlay <edit|delete|chmod|chown>.

    • Display an error during boot if no container is defined.

    • wwctl container list --kernel shows the kernel detected for each container.

    • wwctl container list --size shows the uncompressed size of each container. --compressed shows the compressed size, and --chroot shows the size of the container source on the server.

    • Add a logrotate config for warewulfd.log.

6.15 Creating containers from current HPC environment

Usually users use environment modules to adjust their environment (that is, environment variables like PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, MANPATH etc.) to pick exactly the tools and libraries they need for their work. The same can be achieved with containers by including only those components in a container that are part of this environment. This functionality is now provided using the spack and singularity applications.

6.16 Spack

6.16.1 v0.23.1

  • Fix a correctness issue of ArchSpec.intersects.

  • Make extra_attributes order independent in Spec hashing.

  • Fix issue where system proxy settings were not respected in OCI build caches.

  • Fix an issue where the --test concretizer flag was not forwarded correctly.

  • Fix an issue where codesign and install_name_tool would not preserve hardlinks on Darwin.

  • Fix an issue on Darwin where codesign would run on unmodified binaries.

  • Patch configure scripts generated with libtool < 2.5.4, to avoid redundant flags when creating shared libraries on Darwin.

  • Ensure proper UTF-8 encoding/decoding in logging.

  • Fix issues related to filter_file.

  • Fix an issue related to creating bootstrap source mirrors.

  • Fix an issue where command line config arguments were not always top level.

  • Fix an incorrect typehint of concretized().

  • Improve mention of next Spack version in warning. Tests: fix forward compatibility with Python 3.13.

  • Docs: encourage use of --oci-username-variable and --oci-password-variable.

  • Docs: ensure Getting Started has bootstrap list output in correct place.

6.16.2 v0.23.0

This is a new major release.

6.16.2.1 Features in this Release
  • Spec splicing To make binary installation more seamless in Spack, v0.23 introduces splicing, which allows users to deploy binaries using local, optimized versions of a binary interface, even if they were not built with that interface. For example, this would allow you to build binaries in the cloud using mpich and install them on a system using a local, optimized version of mvapich2 without rebuilding. Spack preserves full provenance for the installed packages and knows that they were built one way but deployed another. The intent is to leverage this across many key HPC binary packages, e.g. MPI, CUDA, ROCm, and libfabric. Fundamentally, splicing allows Spack to redeploy an existing spec with different dependencies than how it was built. There are two interfaces to splicing.

    . Explicit Splicing In the concretizer config, you can specify a target spec and a replacement by hash.

    concretizer:
      splice:
        explicit:
        - target: mpi
          replacement: mpich/abcdef

    Here, every installation that would normally use the target spec will instead use its replacement. Above, any spec using any mpi will be spliced to depend on the specific mpich installation requested. This can go wrong if you try to replace something built with, e.g., openmpi with mpich, and it is on the user to ensure ABI compatibility between target and replacement specs. This currently requires some expertise to use, but it will allow users to reuse the binaries they create across more machines and environments. . Automatic Splicing (experimental) In the concretizer config, enable automatic splicing:

      concretizer:
        splice:
          automatic: true

    or run:

    spack config add concretizer:splice:automatic:true

    The concretizer will select splices for ABI compatibility to maximize package reuse. Packages can denote ABI compatibility using the can_splice directive. No packages in Spack yet use this directive, so if you want to use this feature you will need to add can_splice annotations to your packages. We are working on ways to add more ABI compatibility information to the Spack package repository, and this directive may change in the future.

    Further documentation: https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build_settings.html#splicing https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/packaging_guide.html#specifying-abi-compatibility

  • Broader variant propagation You can specify propagated variants like hdf5 build_type==RelWithDebInfo or trilinos ++openmp to propagate a variant to all dependencies for which it is relevant. This is valid even if the variant does not exist on the package or its dependencies. See https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basic_usage.html#variants.

  • Query specs by namespace Allow a package’s namespace (indicating the repository it came from) to be treated like a variant. You can request packages from particular repos like this:

    spack find zlib namespace=builtin
    spack find zlib namespace=myrepo

    Previously, the spec syntax only allowed namespaces to be prefixes of spec names, e.g. builtin.zlib. The previous syntax still works.

  • spack spec respects environment settings and unify:true spack spec did not previously respect environment lockfiles or unification settings, which made it difficult to see exactly how a spec would concretize within an environment. Now it does, so the output you get with spack spec will be the same as what your environment will concretize to when you run spack concretize. Similarly, if you provide multiple specs on the command line with spack spec, it will concretize them together if unify:true is set.

  • Less noisy spack spec output spack spec previously showed output like this:

    > spack spec /v5fn6xo
    Input spec
    --------------------------------
     -   /v5fn6xo
    
     Concretized
    --------------------------------
    [+]  openssl@3.3.1%apple-clang@16.0.0~docs+shared arch=darwin-sequoia-m1
    ...

    But the input spec is redundant, and we know we run spack spec to concretize the input spec. spack spec now only shows the concretized spec.

  • Better output for spack find -c In an environment, spack find -c lets you search the concretized, but not yet installed, specs, just as you would the installed ones. As with spack spec, this should make it easier for you to see what will be built before building and installing it.

  • spack -C <env>: use an environment’s configuration without activation Spack environments allow you to associate:

    1. a set of (possibly concretized) specs, and

    2. configuration When you activate an environment, you’re using both of these.

      Previously, we supported:

      • spack -e <env> to run spack in the context of a specific environment, and

      • spack -C <directory> to run spack using a directory with configuration files.

    You can now also pass an environment to spack -C to use only the environment’s configuration, but not the specs or lockfile.

6.16.2.2 New commands, options, and directives
  • The new spack env track command takes a non-managed Spack environment and adds a symlink to Spack’s $environments_root directory, so that it will be included for reference counting for commands like spack uninstall and spack gc. If you use free-standing directory environments, this is useful for preventing Spack from removing things required by your environments. You can undo this tracking with the spack env untrack command.

  • Add -t short option for spack --backtrace spack -d / --debug enables backtraces on error, but it can be very verbose, and sometimes you just want the backtrace. spack -t / --backtrace provides that option.

  • gc: restrict to specific specs If you only want to garbage-collect specific packages, you can now provide them on the command line. This gives users finer-grained control over what is uninstalled.

  • oci buildcaches now support --only=package. You can now push just a package and not its dependencies to an OCI registry. This allows dependents of non-redistributable specs to be stored in OCI registries without an error.

6.16.2.3 Highlighted bugfixes
  • Externals no longer override the preferred provider. External definitions could interfere with package preferences. Now, if openmpi is the preferred mpi, and an external mpich is defined, a new openmpi will be built if building it is possible. Previously we would prefer mpich despite the preference.

  • Composable cflags. This release fixes a longstanding bug that concretization would fail if there were different cflags specified in packages.yaml, compilers.yaml, or on the CLI. Flags and their ordering are now tracked in the concretizer and flags from multiple sources will be merged.

  • Fix concretizer Unification for included environments.

6.16.2.4 Deprecations, removals, and syntax changes
  • The old concretizer has been removed from Spack, along with the config:concretizer config option. Spack will emit a warning if the option is present in user configuration, since it now has no effect. Spack now uses a simpler bootstrapping mechanism, where a JSON prototype is tweaked slightly to get an initial concrete spec to download.

  • Best-effort expansion of spec matrices has been removed. This feature did not work with the new ASP-based concretizer, and did not work with unify: True or unify: when_possible. Use the exclude key for the environment to exclude invalid components, or use multiple spec matrices to combine the list of specs for which the constraint is valid and the list of specs for which it is not.

  • The old Cray platform (based on Cray PE modules) has been removed, and platform=cray is no longer supported. Since v0.19, Spack has handled Cray machines like Linux clusters with extra packages, and we have encouraged using this option to support Cray. The new approach allows us to correctly handle Cray machines with non-SLES operating systems, and it is much more reliable than making assumptions about Cray modules. See the v0.19 release notes for more details.

  • The config:install_missing_compilers config option has been deprecated, and it is a no-op when set in v0.23. Our new compiler dependency model will replace it with a much more reliable and robust mechanism in v1.0.

  • Config options that deprecated in v0.21 have been removed in v0.23. You can now only specify preferences for compilers, targets, and providers globally via the packages:all: section. Similarly, you can only specify versions: locally for a specific package.

  • Spack’s old test interface has been removed, having been deprecated in v0.22.0. All builtin packages have been updated to use the new interface. See the stand-alone test documentation

  • The spack versions --safe-only option, deprecated since v0.21.0, has been removed.

  • The --dependencies and --optimize arguments to spack ci have been deprecated.

6.16.2.5 Binary caches
  • Public binary caches now include an ML stack for Linux/aarch64. We now build an ML stack for Linux/aarch64 for all pull requests and on develop. The ML stack includes both CPU-only and CUDA builds for Horovod, Hugging Face, JAX, Keras, PyTorch, scikit-learn, TensorBoard, and TensorFlow, and related packages. The CPU-only stack also includes XGBoost. See https://cache.spack.io/tag/develop/?stack=ml-linux-aarch64-cuda.

6.16.2.6 Architecture support
  • archspec has been updated to v0.2.5, with support for zen5.

  • Spack’s CUDA package now supports the Grace Hopper 9.0a compute capability.

6.16.2.7 Other notable changes
  • Bugfix: spack find -x in environments.

  • Spec splices are now robust to duplicate nodes with the same name in a spec.

  • Cache per-compiler libc calculations for performance.

  • Fixed a bug in external detection for openmpi.

  • Mirror configuration allows username/password as environment variables.

  • Default library search caps maximum depth/

  • Unify interface for spack spec and spack solve commands.

  • Spack no longer RPATHs directories in the default library search path.

  • Improved performance of Spack database.

  • Enable package reuse for packages with versions from git refs.

  • Improved tracking of task queueing/requeueing in the installer.

6.16.3 v0.22.2

6.16.3.1 Bugfixes
  • Forward compatibility with Spack 0.23 packages with language dependencies.

  • Forward compatibility with urllib from Python 3.12.6+.

  • Bump vendored archspec for better aarch64 support.

  • Fix regression in \\{variants.X} and \\{variants.X.value} format strings.

  • Ensure shell escaping of environment variable values in load and activate commands.

  • Fix an issue where spec[pkg] considers specs outside the current DAG.

  • Do not halt concretization on unknown variants in externals.

  • Improve validation of develop config section/

  • Explicitly disable ccache if turned off in config, to avoid cache pollution.

  • Improve backwards compatibility in include_concrete.

  • Fix issue where package tags were sometimes repeated.

  • Make setup-env.sh sourced only by dropping execution bits.

  • Make certain source/binary fetch errors recoverable instead of a hard error.

  • Remove debug statements in package hash computation.

  • Remove redundant clingo warnings.

  • Remove hard-coded layout version.

  • Do not initialize previous store state in use_store.

6.16.3.2 Package updates
  • chapel major update/

6.16.4 v0.22.1

6.16.4.1 Bug Fixes
  • Fix reuse of externals on Linux.

  • Ensure parent gcc-runtime version >= child.

  • Ensure the latest gcc-runtime is rpath’ed when multiple exist among link deps.

  • Improve version detection of glibc.

  • Improve heuristics for solver.

  • Make strong preferences override reuse.

  • Reduce verbosity when C compiler is missing.

  • Make missing ccache executable an error when required.

  • Make every environment view containing python a venv.

  • Fix external detection for compilers with os but no target.

  • Fix version optimization for roots.

  • Handle common implementations of pagination of tags in OCI build caches.

  • Apply fetched patches to develop specs.

  • Avoid Windows wrappers for filesystem utilities on non-Windows.

  • Fix formatting issue in spack audit.

6.16.4.2 Package updates
  • Require libiconv for iconv. Notice that glibc/musl also provide iconv, but are not guaranteed to be complete. Set packages:iconv:require:[glibc] to restore the old behavior.

  • protobuf: fix 3.4:3.21 patch checksum.

  • protobuf: update hash for patch needed when=@3.4:3.21.

  • git: bump v2.39 to 2.45; deprecate unsafe versions.

  • gcc: use -rpath \{rpath_dir} not -rpath=\\{rpath dir}.

  • Remove mesa18 and libosmesa.

  • Enforce consistency of gl providers.

  • py-matplotlib: qualify when to do a post install.

  • rust: fix v1.78.0 instructions.

  • suite-sparse: improve setting of the libs property.

  • netlib-lapack: provide blas and lapack together.

6.17 Slurm 23.02

6.17.1 Important Notes on Upgrading Slurm from a Previous Version

If using the slurmdbd (Slurm DataBase Daemon) you must update this first.

If using a backup DBD you must start the primary first to do any database conversion, the backup will not start until this has happened.

The 23.02 slurmdbd will work with Slurm daemons of version 21.08 and above. You will not need to update all clusters at the same time, but it is very important to update slurmdbd first and having it running before updating any other clusters making use of it.

Slurm can be upgraded from version 22.05 to version 23.02 without loss of jobs or other state information. Upgrading directly from an earlier version of Slurm will result in loss of state information.

All SPANK plugins must be recompiled when upgrading from any Slurm version prior to 23.02.

Note
Note

PMIx v1.x is no longer supported.

6.17.2 Highlights

  • slurmctld - Add new RPC rate limiting feature. This is enabled through SlurmctldParameters=rl_enable, otherwise disabled by default.

  • Make scontrol reconfigure and sending a SIGHUP to the slurmctld behave the same. If you were using SIGHUP as a 'lighter' scontrol reconfigure to rotate logs please update your scripts to use SIGUSR2 instead.

  • Change cloud nodes to show by default. PrivateData=cloud is no longer needed.

  • sreport - Count planned (FKA reserved) time for jobs running in IGNORE_JOBS reservations. Previously was lumped into IDLE time.

  • job_container/tmpfs - Support running with an arbitrary list of private mount points (/tmp and /dev/shm are the default, but not required).

  • job_container/tmpfs - Set more environment variables in InitScript.

  • Make all cgroup directories created by Slurm owned by root. This was the behavior in cgroup/v2 but not in cgroup/v1 where by default the step directories ownership were set to the user and group of the job.

  • accounting_storage/mysql - change purge/archive to calculate record ages based on end time, rather than start or submission times.

  • job_submit/lua - add support for log_user() from slurm_job_modify().

  • Run the following scripts in slurmscriptd instead of slurmctld: ResumeProgram, ResumeFailProgram, SuspendProgram, ResvProlog, ResvEpilog, and RebootProgram (only with SlurmctldParameters=reboot_from_controller).

  • Only permit changing log levels with srun --slurmd-debug by root or SlurmUser.

  • slurmctld will fatal() when reconfiguring the job_submit plugin fails.

  • Add PowerDownOnIdle partition option to power down nodes after nodes become idle.

  • Add [jobid.stepid] prefix from slurmstepd and slurmscriptd prefix from slurmcriptd to Syslog logging. Previously was only happening when logging to a file.

  • Add purge and archive functionality for job environment and job batch script records.

  • Extend support for Include files to all "configless" client commands.

  • Make node weight usable for powered down and rebooting nodes.

  • Removed launch plugin.

  • Add Extra field to job to store extra information other than a comment.

  • Add usage gathering for AMD (requires ROCM 5.5+) and NVIDIA gpus.

  • Add job’s allocated nodes, features, oversubscribe, partition, and reservation to SLURM_RESUME_FILE output for power saving.

  • Automatically create directories for stdout/stderr output files. Paths may use %j and related substitution characters as well.

  • Add --tres-per-task to salloc/sbatch/srun.

  • Allow nodefeatures plugin features to work with cloud nodes. e.g. - Powered down nodes have no active changeable features.

    • Nodes can’t be changed to other active features until powered down.

    • Active changeable features are reset/cleared on power down.

  • Make slurmstepd cgroups constrained by total configured memory from slurm.conf (NodeName=<> RealMemory=#) instead of total physical memory.

  • node_features/helpers - add support for the OR and parentheses operators in a --constraint expression.

  • slurmctld will fatal() when [Prolog|Epilog]Slurmctld are defined but are not executable.

  • Validate node registered active features are a super set of node’s currently active changeable features.

  • On clusters without any PrologFlags options, batch jobs with failed prologs nolonger generate an output file.

  • Add SLURM_JOB_START_TIME and SLURM_JOB_END_TIME environment variables.

  • Add SuspendExcStates option to slurm.conf to avoid suspending/powering down specific node states.

  • Add support for DCMI power readings in IPMI plugin.

  • slurmrestd served /slurm/v0.0.39 and /slurmdb/v0.0.39 endpoints had major changes from prior versions. Almost all schemas have been renamed and modified. Sites using OpenAPI Generator clients are highly suggested to upgrade to to using atleast version 6.x due to limitations with prior versions.

  • Allow for --nodelist to contain more nodes than required by --nodes.

  • Rename nodes to nodes_resume in SLURM_RESUME_FILE job output.

  • Rename all_nodes to all_nodes_resume in SLURM_RESUME_FILE output.

  • Add jobcomp/kafka plugin.

  • Add new PreemptParameters=reclaim_licenses option which will allow higher priority jobs to preempt jobs to free up used licenses. (This is only enabled for with PreemptModes of CANCEL and REQUEUE, as Slurm cannot guarantee suspended jobs will release licenses correctly.)

  • hpe/slingshot - add support for the instant-on feature.

  • Add ability to update SuspendExc* parameters with scontrol.

  • Add ability to restore SuspendExc* parameters on restart with slurmctld -R option.

  • Add ability to clear a GRES specification by setting it to "0" via scontrol update job.

  • Add SLURM_JOB_OVERSUBSCRIBE environment variable for Epilog, Prolog, EpilogSlurmctld, PrologSlurmctld, and mail ouput.

  • System node down reasons are appended to existing reasons, separated by ':'.

  • New command scrun has been added. scrun acts as an Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime proxy to run containers seamlessly via Slurm.

  • Fixed GpuFreqDef option. When set in slurm.conf, it will be used if --gpu-freq was not explicitly set by the job step.

6.17.3 Configuration File Changes (see appropriate man page for details)

  • job_container.conf - Added Dirs option to list desired private mount points.

  • node_features plugins - invalid users specified for AllowUserBoot will now result in fatal() rather than just an error.

  • Deprecate AllowedKmemSpace, ConstrainKmemSpace, MaxKmemPercent, and MinKmemSpace.

  • Allow jobs to queue even if the user is not in AllowGroups when EnforcePartLimits=no is set. This ensures consistency for all the Partition access controls, and matches the documented behavior for EnforcePartLimits.

  • Add InfluxDBTimeout parameter to acct_gather.conf.

  • job_container/tmpfs - add support for expanding %h and %n in BasePath.

  • slurm.conf - Removed SlurmctldPlugstack option.

  • Add new SlurmctldParameters=validate_nodeaddr_threads=<number> option to allow concurrent hostname resolution at slurmctld startup.

  • Add new AccountingStoreFlags=job_extra option to store a job’s extra field in the database.

  • Add new defer_batch option to SchedulerParameters to only defer scheduling for batch jobs.

  • Add new DebugFlags option JobComp to replace Elasticsearch.

  • Add configurable job requeue limit parameter - MaxBatchRequeue - in slurm.conf to permit changes from the old hard-coded value of 5.

  • helpers.conf - Allow specification of node specific features.

  • helpers.conf - Allow many features to one helper script.

  • job_container/tmpfs - Add Shared option to support shared namespaces. This allows autofs to work with the job_container/tmpfs plugin when enabled.

  • acct_gather.conf - Added EnergyIPMIPowerSensors=Node=DCMI and Node=DCMI_ENHANCED.

  • Add new getnameinfo_cache_timeout=<number> option to CommunicationParameters to adjust or disable caching the results of getnameinfo().

  • Add new PrologFlags=ForceRequeueOnFail option to automatically requeue batch jobs on Prolog failures regardless of the job --requeue setting.

  • Add HealthCheckNodeState=NONDRAINED_IDLE option.

  • Add explicit to Flags in gres.conf. This makes it so the gres is not automatically added to a job’s allocation when --exclusive is used. Note that this is a per-node flag.

  • Moved the preempt_ options from SchedulerParameters to PreemptParameters, and dropped the prefix from the option names. (The old options will still be parsed for backwards compatibility, but are now undocumented.)

  • Add LaunchParameters=ulimit_pam_adopt, which enables setting RLIMIT_RSS in adopted processes.

  • Update SwitchParameters=job_vni to enable/disable creating job VNIs for all jobs, or when a user requests them.

  • Update SwitchParameters=single_node_vni to enable/disable creating single node VNIs for all jobs, or when a user requests them.

  • Add ability to preserve SuspendExc* parameters on reconfig with ReconfigFlags=KeepPowerSaveSettings.

  • slurmdbd.conf - Add new AllResourcesAbsolute to force all new resources to be created with the Absolute flag.

  • topology/tree - Add new TopologyParam=SwitchAsNodeRank option to reorder nodes based on switch layout. This can be useful if the naming convention for the nodes does not natually map to the network topology.

  • Removed the default setting for GpuFreqDef. If unset, no attempt to change the GPU frequency will be made if --gpu-freq is not set for the step.

6.17.4 Command Changes (see man pages for details)

  • sacctmgr - no longer force updates to the AdminComment, Comment, or SystemComment to lower-case.

  • sinfo - Add -F/--future option to sinfo to display future nodes.

  • sacct - Rename Reserved field to Planned to match sreport and the nomenclature of the 'Planned' node.

  • scontrol - advanced reservation flag MAINT will no longer replace nodes, similar to STATIC_ALLOC

  • sbatch - add parsing for #PBS -d and #PBS -w.

  • scontrol show assoc_mgr will show username(uid) instead of uid in QoS section.

  • Add strigger --draining and -R/--resume options.

  • Change --oversubscribe and --exclusive to be mutually exclusive for job submission. Job submission commands will now fatal if both are set. Previously, these options would override each other, with the last one in the job submission command taking effect.

  • scontrol - Requested TRES and allocated TRES will now always be printed when showing jobs, instead of one TRES output that was either the requested or allocated.

  • srun --ntasks-per-core now applies to job and step allocations. Now, use of --ntasks-per-core=1 implies --cpu-bind=cores and --ntasks-per-core>1 implies --cpu-bind=threads.

  • salloc/sbatch/srun - Check and abort if ntasks-per-core > threads-per-core.

  • scontrol - Add ResumeAfter=<secs> option to scontrol update nodename=.

  • Add a new nodes= argument to scontrol setdebug to allow the debug level on the slurmd processes to be temporarily altered.

  • Add a new nodes= argument to scontrol setdebugflags as well.

  • Make it so scrontab prints client-side the job_submit() error messsage (which can be set i.e. by using the log_user() function for the lua plugin).

  • scontrol - Reservations will not be allowed to have STATIC_ALLOC or MAINT flags and REPLACE[_DOWN] flags simultaneously.

  • scontrol - Reservations will only accept one reoccurring flag when being created or updated.

  • scontrol - A reservation cannot be updated to be reoccurring if it is already a floating reservation.

  • squeue - removed unused %s and SelectJobInfo formats.

  • squeue - align print format for exit and derived codes with that of other components (<exit_status>:<signal_number>).

  • sacct - Add --array option to expand job arrays and display array tasks on separate lines.

  • Partial support for --json and --yaml formated outputs have been implemented for sacctmgr, sdiag, sinfo, squeue, and scontrol. The resultant data ouput will be filtered by normal command arguments. Formatting arguments will continue to be ignored.

  • salloc/sbatch/srun - extended the --nodes syntax to allow for a list of valid node counts to be allocated to the job. This also supports a "step count" value (e.g., --nodes=20-100:20 is equivalent to --nodes=20,40,60,80,100) which can simplify the syntax when the job needs to scale by a certain "chunk" size.

  • srun - add user requestible vnis with --network=job_vni option.

  • srun - add user requestible single node VNIs with the --network=single_node_vni option.

6.17.5 API Changes

  • job_container plugins - container_p_stepd_create() function signature replaced uint32_t uid with stepd_step_rec_t* step.

  • gres plugins - gres_g_get_devices() function signature replaced pid_t pid with stepd_step_rec_t* step.

  • cgroup plugins - task_cgroup_devices_constrain() function signature removed pid_t pid.

  • task plugins - replace task_p_pre_set_affinity(), task_p_set_affinity(), and task_p_post_set_affinity() with task_p_pre_launch_priv() like it was back in slurm 20.11.

  • Allow for concurrent processing of job_submit_g_submit() and job_submit_g_modify() calls. If your plugin is not capable of concurrent operation you must add additional locking within your plugin.

  • Removed return value from slurm_list_append().

  • The List and ListIterator types have been removed in favor of list_t and list_itr_t respectively.

  • burst buffer plugins - add bb_g_build_het_job_script(). bb_g_get_status() - added authenticated UID and GID. bb_g_run_script() - added job_info argument.

  • burst_buffer.lua - Pass UID and GID to most hooks. Pass job_info (detailed job information) to many hooks. See etc/burst_buffer.lua.example for a complete list of changes. WARNING: Backwards compatibility is broken for slurm_bb_get_status: UID and GID are passed before the variadic arguments. If UID and GID are not explicitly listed as arguments to slurm_bb_get_status(), then they will be included in the variadic arguments. Backwards compatibility is maintained for all other hooks because the new arguments are passed after the existing arguments.

  • node_features plugins - node_features_p_reboot_weight() function removed. node_features_p_job_valid() - added parameter feature_list. node_features_p_job_xlate() - added parameters feature_list and job_node_bitmap.

  • New data_parser interface with v0.0.39 plugin.

6.17.6 Known Issues

  • The --uid option for the srun command is broken: its use may lead to the error message job <job ID> queued and waiting for resources. This does not, however, affect the sbatch command.

6.18 Apptainer

  • Update to version 1.3.6

    • Avoid using kernel overlayfs when the lower layer is a sandbox on an incompatible filesystem type such as GPFS or Lustre. For those cases use fuse-overlayfs instead. This fixes a regression introduced in 1.3.0. The regression didn’t much impact Lustre because kernel overlayfs refused to try to use it and Apptainer proceeded to use fuse-overlayfs anyway, but with GPFS the kernel overlayfs allowed mounting but returned stale file handle errors.

  • Version 1.3.5

    • Fix a regression introduced in 1.3.4 that overwrote existing standard /.singularity.d files such as runscript in container images even if they had been modified.

    • Skip attempting to bind inaccessible mount points when handling the mount hostfs = yes configuration option.

    • Support parsing nested variables defined inside %arguments section of definition files.

    • Ignore invalid environment variables when pulling oci/docker containers.

  • Version 1.3.4

    • Fixed sif-embedded overlay partitions for containers that are larger than 2 gigabytes.

    • Fixed the failure when starting apptainer with instance --fakeroot.

    • apptainer build -B ... can now be used to mount custom resolv.conf and hosts files from non-standard outside locations. This can be used to run apptainer build in a nix-build sandbox that has no /etc/resolv.conf.

    • Fixed failing builds from local images that have symbolic links for paths that are part of the base container environment (e.g. /var/tmp → /tmp).

    • Show info messages suggesting to use enable underlay = preferred or the --underlay flag when overlay is implied for bind mounts but the kernel is too old to support fuse mounts in user namespaces and so tries to use fusermount.

    • When someone uses a yum bootstrap to build a container without using subuid-based fakeroot or root, warn that it is unlikely to work.

    • Allow a writable --overlay to be used with --nvccli instead of --writable-tmpfs.

    • If an error no descriptor found for reference is seen while getting an oci container, retry the operation up to five times.

    • Make fakeroot Recommended for SUSE rpms instead of Required.

    • Allow bind mounts onto existing files on r/o NFS filesystems.

    • If an error is seen in the %post section when building a container using fakeroot mode 3 (with the fakeroot command) then show a message suggesting using --ignore-fakeroot-command and referring to the documentation about how to install and use it inside the container definition file.

    • Show a more helpful error message when using fakeroot in suid mode and there’s an /etc/subuid mapping even though user namespaces are not available (user namespaces are required for /etc/subuid mapping).

  • Version 1.3.3

    • Added libcudadebugger.so to nvliblist.conf to support cuda-gdb in CUDA 12+.

    • Ensure opened/kept file descriptors in stage 1 are not closed during the Go garbage collection to avoid bad file descriptor errors at startup.

    • Fixed a segmentation violation issue when running Apptainer checkpoint.

    • Fixed an issue that Apptainer won’t read default docker credentials.

  • Version 1.3.2

    • Fix for CVE-2024-3727 in a dependent library which describes a flaw that can allow attackers to trigger unexpected authenticated registry accesses due to object digest values not being validated in all cases.

    • Fixed the issue when nesting apptainer instance start inside a container on cgroups-v2 capable host.

    • Fixed the issue that oras download progress bar gets stuck when downloading large images.

  • Version 1.3.1

    • Make apptainer build work with signed Docker containers.

    • Fixed regression introduced in 1.3.0 that prevented closing cryptsetup and the corresponding loop device after running an encrypted sif container file in suid mode.

    • Stopped binding over the default timezone in the container with the host’s timezone, which led to unexpected behavior if the application changed timezones.

    • Added progress bars for oras:// push and pull.

    • Hide Instance stats will not be available message under --sharens mode.

    • Fix problem where credentials locally stored with registry login command were not usable in some execution flows. Run registry login again with latest version to ensure credentials are stored correctly.

    • Make runscript timeout configurable.

    • Return invalid bind path mount options during bind path parsing.

    • Make the INFO message more helpful when a running background process at exit time causes a FUSE mount to not shut down cleanly.

    • Fixed the wrong mediaType in the oras push manifest.

  • Use go-jose version with fix for CVE-2024-28180.

7 Removed and deprecated features and packages

This section lists features and packages that were removed from SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing or will be removed in upcoming versions.

  • dapl, rds-tools, and imgen are being deprecated due to lack of upstream activity.

  • openmpi 2 and openmpi 3 are being deprecated due to being replaced by openmpi 4.

7.1 Removed features and packages

The following features and packages have been removed in this release.

  • Python 2 bindings for genders has been removed. These are now provided for Python 3.

  • Ganglia is not supported anymore in 15 SP7. It has been replaced with Grafana (https://grafana.com/)

  • Due to a lack of usage by customers, some library packages have been removed from the HPC module in SLE HPC 15 SP7. On SUSE Linux Enterprise you can build your own library using spack. These libraries will continue to be available through SUSE Package Hub. The following libraries have been removed:

    • boost

    • adios

    • gsl

    • fftw3

    • hypre

    • metis

    • mumps

    • netcdf

    • ocr

    • petsc

    • ptscotch

    • scalapack

    • superlu

    • trilinos

7.2 Deprecated features and packages

The following features and packages are deprecated and will be removed in a future version of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing.

  • clustduct is deprecated and will be removed in SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP8. With SLE HPC 15 SP7, warewulf4 has been introduced as cluster deployment tool, and users are advised to migrate to it.

8 Obtaining source code

This SUSE product includes materials licensed to SUSE under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL requires SUSE to provide the source code that corresponds to the GPL-licensed material. The source code is available for download at https://www.suse.com/download/sle-hpc/ on Medium 2. For up to three years after distribution of the SUSE product, upon request, SUSE will mail a copy of the source code. Send requests by e-mail to sle_source_request@suse.com. SUSE may charge a reasonable fee to recover distribution costs.

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