The Qlustar team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Qlustar 13 for download [1]. It updates Qlustar's core platform to current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The AlmaLinux [2] edge platform remains based on 8.6 while CentOS 7 [3] is still supported via Qlustar 12 images and the new cross-version compatibility.
The highlights of this release are the addition of BMC hardware management via IPMI/Redfish in QluMan, the integration of Spack as the new HPC package manager and the cross-version compatibility between Qlustar releases.
QluMan's new *BMC hardware management* support allows for BMC authentification management, power control of nodes via IPMI or Redfish, the display of BIOS settings as well as their validation and correction. A cumulative problem report showing an overview of cluster node misconfigurations has also been added to QluMan.
Spack [4] has been introduced as the new package manager for HPC related application software beyond the so-called *Qlustar HPC core stack*. It offers a huge list of supported software packages and by design provides hardware optimized versions of them.
The HPC core stack is a new component definition within Qlustar and is related to the introduction of Spack. Rather than aiming to provide as much HPC functionality as possible by OS packages (debs/rpms), the HPC core stack now makes a clear cut between Qlustar related system software which remains provided as OS packages and HPC application software.
Starting with this release, *cross-version compatibility* between the current and the previous Qlustar release has been added. In practice this means, that on a cluster with a Qlustar 13 head-node you can still run nodes with Qlustar 12 images/chroots and vice versa. This new feature was added to allow even smoother release upgrades.
Highlights among the various *major component updates* include Kernel 5.15.x, Slurm 22.05.x, Lustre 2.15.1, ZFS 2.1.6 and BeeGFS 7.3.2. Please read the release notes [5] for more details.
[1] https://qlustar.com/download/ [2] https://almalinux.org/ [3] https://www.centos.org/ [4] https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [5] https://docs.qlustar.com/Qlustar/13/ClusterOS/release-notes.html