Major upgrade of Fox September 25--29

The operating system on Fox will be upgraded starting September 25. This is a major upgrade, and will take a week. During the upgrade, Fox will be unavailable.

Fox currently runs Rocky 8, which will be upgraded to Rocky 9, the latest version. (Rocky is a RedHat clone.) We will also upgrade the queue system (Slurm) to its latest version.

Jobs that cannot complete before the downtime will not be scheduled. Because there is a high risk that jobs submitted before the upgrade will need modification to work after the upgrade (for instance, module versions will change), all pending jobs will be cancelled when the maintenance starts.

The software available via "module load" will be reinstalled. We will install the 2021a toolchain and newer. This rebuilt software will be available on VDIs running RedHat 9 during the Fox maintenance.

Your home directories and project areas will be available in VDIs as normal during the downtime.

When the upgrade is done, Fox will still run the same "flavour" of Linux (RedHat) as now, so you should be able to work mostly as you do today. But there will be commands and things that have changed or work differently, so you will probably have to do some changes:

• New software module toolchains: 2021a and newer. Some old versions will not be rebuilt (2020b and older toolchains). You can request additional software using our software request form: https://nettskjema.no/a/usit-sw-request#/page/1

• Job scripts will need modification, since module versions will change

• You will most likely have to recompile any software that you have compiled on Fox today. This includes things like R packages with C or Fortran code in it. Since the software modules will be available on VDIs during the downtime, it is possible to to test and recompile your software before the downtime is over.

Follow the opslog for updates.