SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease)

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 SP5 (prerelease) and important product updates.

This product will be released in June 2022. The latest version of these release
notes is always available at https://www.suse.com/releasenotes. Drafts of the
general documentation can be found at https://susedoc.github.io/sle-hpc/main.

Publication Date: 2022-11-30, Version: 15.500000000.20221130

1 About the release notes
2 SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing
3 Modules, extensions, and related products
4 Technology previews
5 Modules
6 Changes affecting all architectures
7 Removed and deprecated features and packages
8 Obtaining source code
9 Legal notices
A Changelog for 15 SP5 (prerelease)

    A.1 2022-11-30
    A.2 2022-10-18
    A.3 2022-08-31
    A.4 2022-05-11
    A.5 2022-03-23
    A.6 2021-11-03

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 SP5 (prerelease)
provides tools and libraries related to High Performance Computing. This
includes:

  o Workload manager

  o Remote and parallel shells

  o Performance monitoring and measuring tools

  o Serial console monitoring tool

  o Cluster power management tool

  o A tool for discovering the machine hardware topology

  o System monitoring

  o A tool for monitoring memory errors

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

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

  o Serial and parallel computational libraries providing the common standards
    BLAS, LAPACK, ...

  o Various MPI implementations

  o Serial and parallel libraries for the HDF5 file format

2.1 Hardware Platform Support

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) 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:

  o Section 2.4, "Support statement for SUSE Linux Enterprise for
    High-Performance Computing"

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 (SP5) will be fully maintained and supported until 6 months
after the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance
Computing 15 SP6.

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:

  o The support policy at https://www.suse.com/support/policy.html

  o Long Term Service Pack Support page at https://www.suse.com/support/
    programs/long-term-service-pack-support.html

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:

  o Technology Previews, see Section 4, "Technology previews"

  o Sound, graphics, fonts and artwork

  o Packages that require an additional customer contract, see Section 2.4.1,
    "Software requiring specific contracts"

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 SP5 (prerelease) (and
the SUSE Linux Enterprise modules) includes the following software that is
shipped only under a GNU AGPL software license:

  o Ghostscript (including subpackages)

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) (and
the SUSE Linux Enterprise modules) includes the following software that is
shipped under multiple licenses that include a GNU AGPL software license:

  o MySpell dictionaries and LightProof

  o ArgyllCMS

2.5 Documentation and other information

2.5.1 Available on the product media

  o Read the READMEs on the media.

  o 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

  o Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of the installation medium for a
    chronological log of all changes made to the updated packages.

  o Find more information in the docu directory of the installation medium of
    SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease).
    This directory includes PDF versions of the SUSE Linux Enterprise for
    High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) Installation Quick Start
    Guide.

2.5.2 Online documentation

  o For the most up-to-date version of the documentation for SUSE Linux
    Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease), see https://
    susedoc.github.io/sle-hpc/main (draft version).

  o Find a collection of White Papers in the SUSE Linux Enterprise for
    High-Performance Computing Resource Library at https://www.suse.com/
    products/server#resources.

3 Modules, extensions, and related products

This section comprises information about modules and extensions for SUSE Linux
Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) Modules and
extensions add functionality to the system.

3.1 Modules in the SLE 15 SP5 (prerelease) product line

The SLE 15 SP5 (prerelease) product line is made up of modules that contain
software packages. Each module has a clearly defined scope. Modules differ in
their life cycles and update timelines.

The modules available within the product line based on SUSE Linux Enterprise
15 SP5 (prerelease) at the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for
High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) are listed in the Modules and
Extensions Quick Start at https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP3/html/
SLES-all/article-modules.html.

Not all SLE modules are available with a subscription for SUSE Linux Enterprise
for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5 (prerelease) itself (see the column 
Available for).

For information about the availability of individual packages within modules,
see https://scc.suse.com/packages.

3.2 Available extensions

The following extension is not covered by SUSE support agreements, available at
no additional cost and without an extra registration key: SUSE Package Hub, see
https://packagehub.suse.com/.

3.3 Related products

This sections lists related products. Usually, these products have their own
release notes documents that are available from https://www.suse.com/
releasenotes.

  o SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: https://www.suse.com/products/server

  o SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS: https://www.suse.com/products/server/jeos

  o SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop: https://www.suse.com/products/desktop

  o SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications: https://www.suse.com/
    products/sles-for-sap

  o SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time: https://www.suse.com/products/realtime

  o SUSE Manager: https://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager

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 SP5 (prerelease) 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 SP5 (prerelease)
kernels on x86-64 use 4K page size.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing for POWER 15 SP5 
(prerelease) 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.

This module is available with the SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance
Computing only. It is selected by default during the installation. 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 SP5 (prerelease).

6.1 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/.

6.2 Automatically opened ports

Installing the following packages automatically opens the following ports:

  o dolly - TCP ports 9997 and 9998

  o 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.

6.3 dolly

dolly has been updated to version 0.63.6. It includes some fixes for hostname
resolution, a better documentation and now provides a default configuration for
firewall.

6.4 memkind

memkind has been updated to version 1.12.0. The full list of changes is
available at http://memkind.github.io/memkind/.

6.5 openblas

openblas has been updated to version 0.3.17. It contains performance regression
fixes and optimization. For more information see https://github.com/xianyi/
OpenBLAS/releases/tag/v0.3.17.

6.6 spack

spack has been updated to version 0.17.1. It now includes support to build
singularity containers from https://registry.suse.com/.

6.7 mpich

mpich has been updated to version 3.4.2. For more information see https://
www.mpich.org/2021/05/28/mpich-3-4-2-released/.

6.8 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.

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.

7.1 Removed features and packages

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

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

  o Ganglia is not supported anymore in 15 SP5 (prerelease). It has been
    replaced with Grafana (https://grafana.com/)

  o Due to a lack of usage by customers, some library packages have been
    removed from the HPC module in SLE HPC 15 SP5 (prerelease). 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.

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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A Changelog for 15 SP5 (prerelease)

A.1 2022-11-30

A.1.1 New

  o Fix product version

A.2 2022-10-18

A.2.1 New

  o Added Section 6.1, "Enriched system visibility in the SUSE Customer Center
    (SCC)" (Jira)

A.3 2022-08-31

A.3.1 New

  o Added Section 6.2, "Automatically opened ports" (Jira)

A.4 2022-05-11

A.4.1 New

  o Added this changelog

A.5 2022-03-23

A.5.1 New

  o Added Section 6.8, "Creating containers from current HPC environment" (Jira
    )

  o Added notes about dolly, memkind, openblas, spack, and mpich in Section 6,
    "Changes affecting all architectures"

  o Added note about Ganglia being unsupported in Section 7, "Removed and
    deprecated features and packages" (Jira)

  o Added note about removal of Python 2 bindings for genders (Jira)

A.5.2 Updates

  o Added a note about building libraries using spack in Section 7, "Removed
    and deprecated features and packages" (Jira)

  o Added adios and superlu to the list of removed libraries in Section 7,
    "Removed and deprecated features and packages"

A.6 2021-11-03

  o Initial SP5 release

(C) 2022 SUSE

