Blanca nodes to be updated to RHEL8 by July 1

[mdpiper]

CSDMS owns a set of compute nodes (see https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/HPC) on the Blanca cluster, which is maintained by the CU Research Computing group. Below is information from a recent email that will affect us as users of Blanca.

Who is impacted?: Anyone who owns or uses nodes on the Blanca condo cluster.

What will happen?: All Blanca nodes presently run the Redhat7 (RHEL7) operating system. RHEL7 will go out of support by July 1, and therefore all Blanca nodes will be updated to the RHEL8 operating system prior to this date.

What will be the impact to my workflow?: The update will necessitate the retirement of the current Blanca software stack. If you use Blanca, this means that any software you currently load with the "module load" command may no longer be available. If you use personally compiled software (any fortran/c/c++ software that requires you to load an intel or gcc compiler), this will need to be recompiled. Once the update has been made, Blanca will share a common software stack with Alpine, since both systems will have the RHEL8 operating system.

When will this happen?: We will reach out to the PIs/POCs for individual groups in the forthcoming weeks to schedule a convenient time to updated your node(s) from RHEL7 to RHEL8. We will also offer assistance modifying job scripts and recompiling software to minimize the impacts on your workflows.

If you have any questions, please contact us through the CSDMS Help Desk or visit us at CSDMS Office Hours.

[mdpiper]

I know that I have a few projects that will be affected by this, and I'll need to rebuild them.