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ProPack4

               SGI Altix to be Upgraded to ProPack 4
                        August 12, 2006

NCSA is upgrading the operating system of it's SGI Altix (cobalt) from 
SGI ProPack 3 to ProPack 4. Please submit jobs to ProPack 4 to make 
sure your application codes work with the new operating system. No 
service units will be charged for these jobs. The system will run 
small jobs on ProPack 4 now and will run larger jobs from August 
16-29. If there are no major problems during testing, the entire Altix 
system will be upgraded to ProPack 4 on August 30-31.

To submit a "friendly user" job to ProPack 4, log in to 
co-login2.ncsa.uiuc.edu and submit jobs from there. Jobs that request 
no more than 8 processors and 7 Gbytes of memory can run now. Jobs 
that request more processors or memory will run on co-compute2 
starting Wednesday.

ProPack 3 vs ProPack 4
----------------------
SGI ProPack 3 was based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 3 
which uses the Linux 2.4 kernel. ProPack 4 is based on SUSE Linux 
Enterprise Server 9 (SLES9) which uses the Linux 2.6 kernel. Here is a 
brief summary of the differences:

                         ProPack 3       ProPack 4
                         ---------       ---------
      Distribution       RedHat          SLES9
      Linux Kernel       2.4.21          2.6.5
      glibc              2.3.2-95        2.3.3-98
      batch system       pbs-5.4.1       pbs-7.1.1

User Impact
-----------
Jobs that require more than 1.9 Gbytes of memory per processor must be 
run on ProPack 4.

In general, programs built on ProPack 3 should run without problems on 
ProPack 4. Please let us know if you have to recompile your program to 
get it to work with ProPack 4.

On ProPack 3, batch jobs could use memory associated with processors 
that were assigned to other jobs. Starting with ProPack 4, jobs are 
limited to the memory associated with the processors assigned to the 
job. If the job requires more memory that is available, it will be 
killed by the system.

If you need to use old Linux pthreads with ProPack 4, set the following:

  setenv LD_ASSUME_KERNEL 2.4.21

Please help us ensure that ProPack 4 is ready for production by 
reporting any problems or issues to the NCSA Consulting Office via 
electronic mail at consult@ncsa.uiuc.edu or by telephone at (217) 244-1144.
SGI Altix 3700:usr/news/ProPack4
Last Modified: August 13, 2006