Peloton Cluster Upgrade Release

We have opened Peloton up for use after upgrading compute and storage nodes to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. 

The HPCCF is making some changes to the systems that it supports to ensure consistency to improve customer service. Please note the following changes because of the upgrade:

  • The conda deployment on Peloton has been reworked. There is now a centralized conda install, which can be activated with module load conda. This will configure conda shell support and activate the base environment. Note that if you have an existing conda installation in your home directory, this module will fail to load; you will need to remove the conda activation code from your bash profile to use it.
  • There are also several centrally managed conda environments available, which are named following the form conda/[software-version] or conda/collections/[collection-name]. The collections environments bring together commonly used packages on a theme, while the environments named for a particular piece of software contain only that software and its dependencies.

 

  • With the base conda module loaded, you can create and activate environments in your home directory as with any other conda install. Existing environments will be picked up by the new system conda install and should show up when running conda env list. For faster environment solving, the base conda install also includes mamba, which can replace the conda command.
     
  • There is a new R module containing R version 4.2.3 and many libraries. This R module is contained in a conda environment that will be activated upon module load.
     
  • New accounts will no longer be created on the HPC website. Instead, new accounts will be generated through our High-Performance Personnel Onboarding user portal, HiPPO, at https://hippo.ucdavis.edu/Peloton/create. New accounts will have a 20G home directory separate from any group affiliation. These accounts will also have access to group storage owned by their sponsor.

 

  • The DNS entry to access Peloton will change. Peloton will now be accessed at  peloton.hpc.ucdavis.edu. As a result, users might get an error stating, “Warning: Remote Host Identification Has Changed” upon login.  If this occurs, users can remove the old host key with the following: 

 

  • Linux: ssh-keygen -R peloton.cse.ucdavis.edu

 

  • Windows OpenSSH - Edit (or remove) the known_hosts file in the Windows Explorer application at: %USERPROFILE%/.ssh/known_hosts

 

  • Software modules have been reinstalled. The naming of some modules have changed. Please scan the module list if you don’t immediately find what you are looking for. You can find a list of available modules with:

            module avail -l 

  • You can also use this command with grep to search for a module name.
    • module avail -l | grep -i <module name>

and load any available module with:

  • module load <module> 

 

  • Pre-existing modules that had been built against the previous operating system have been moved to ‘deprecated’. These can still be loaded, but might not have desired functionality.

If you have trouble with existing software modules or you need specific software modules installed, please put in a ticket to hpc-help@ucdavis.edu. We will be monitoring the queue to prioritize Peloton issues.