The end of another week has brought about some exciting developments in eResearch HPC. We have upgraded the series700 nodes from SLES11sp3 to SLES12. The main reason for the upgrade was to test the live patching technology called” kGraft”. HPC (High Performance Computing) calculations with lots of data spread over many systems often cannot afford to stop and save all that data to storage. The team has been down the road of rolling reboots of the HPC cluster and this takes a long long time and is not advisable. Live patching however helps to keep the HPC going and your jobs running without interruption.
More information about kGraft can be found here
The team will keep blogging about the progress of the upgrades.