Release Notes #

SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP4 is available for the Intel 64/AMD64 (x86-64) and AArch64 platforms.

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

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 (SP4) will be fully maintained and supported until 6 months after the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP5.

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:

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:

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.

The SLE 15 SP4 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 SP4 at the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP4 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 SP4 itself (see the column Available for).

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

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/.

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

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 SP4 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: 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: 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: 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: Cross-architecture compatibility considerations

The SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing 15 SP4 kernels on x86-64 use 4K page size.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise for High-Performance Computing for POWER 15 SP4 kernel uses 64K page size.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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/.

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.

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

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