Release Notes
1. Basic Info
The Qlustar 14 release is based on Ubuntu 24.04. It includes all security fixes and other package updates published before Apr 26th 2025. Available security updates relevant to Qlustar 14 that have appeared after this date, will be announced on the Qlustar website and in the Qlustar security newsletter. Supported edge-platforms are Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) and AlmaLinux 8.
2. New features
2.1. State of the Art Qlustar Monitoring
The Qlustar monitoring stack has been reimplemented from the ground up and is now based on Grafana + Prometheus. Both of them are tightly integrated with the other Qlustar components and can be controlled with a powerful new configuration interface of the QluMan GUI.
Customized Grafana dashboards are available to provide a nice interface for the hardware and software components of a Qlustar cluster. As a consequence, we say goodbye to the legacy Ganglia/Nagios based stack which served Qlustar and its users well for many years.
2.2. QluMan 14 with Management of Monitoring Configs
Supplementing the new Grafana/Prometheus monitoring stack a new configuration module has been added to conveniently configure the Prometheus setup including a powerful interface to define alerts for any metric defined for Prometheus.
3. Major component updates/versions
- Kernel 6.12
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Qlustar 14 is based on the 6.12 LTS kernel series (Ubuntu only) with initial version 6.12.25.
- Slurm
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Qlustar 14 starts with the HPC Core stack 25.03 (same as current Qlustar 13) which includes the Slurm 24.11 series with the current version being 24.11.3.
- ZFS
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Qlustar 14 includes the ZFS 2.2.x series with the current version being 2.2.7.
- Nvidia CUDA
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Qlustar 14 provides optimal support for Nvidia GPU hardware by supplying pre-compiled and up-to-date kernel drivers as well as core libraries of CUDA 12.6.3 needed for integration with other system components. Full CUDA releases should be installed via Spack.
- Lustre
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Qlustar 14 comes with the most recent Lustre LTS version 2.15.6 providing support for clients and servers with ready-to-use image modules.
- BeeGFS
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Qlustar 14 has integrated the most recent BeeGFS release 7.4.6 for clients and servers with ready-to-use image modules.
4. Other notable package version updates
Packages part of the Qlustar HPC core stack (25.03):
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spack: 0.23.1 -
rdma-core: 55.0 -
hwloc: 2.11.2 -
pmix: 5.0.6 -
ucx: 1.18.1
6. Qlustar Cross-Version Compatibility
Cross-version compatibility is provided between Qlustar 13 and 14. In practice this means that on a cluster with a Qlustar 14 head-node, you can still run nodes with Qlustar 13 images/chroots and vice versa. This allows smooth release upgrades: Admins can already run a subset of nodes with the new Qlustar release and do the final migration on the head-node(s) only, once users have successfully migrated their applications to it. After the full upgrade is done, it is still possible to run some nodes with the old release in case some problematic applications require it.