HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software

The HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15. HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software enhances SLES with open source, third-party proprietary, and HPE proprietary components for performance, scaling, reliability, and time-to-market purposes. Default HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software comprise a subset of SLES package to minimize compute node memory usage and operating system noise. HPE Cray OS software includes a kernel, commands, libraries, and services that run on compute and non-compute nodes.

With HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software 23.11, the kernel module and user packages that provide value add features to enhance the compute node environment are packaged separately from kernel modifications to SLES base OS. The separate package is called User Services Software (USS). The modified kernel package is called COS base. Both USS and COS base are installed together to provide full capabilities of HPE Cray Supercomputing Operating System Software. The user services software includes value-add features in the areas of files system integration, compute at scale, power measurement and workload manager integration and orchestration.

Base OS

• SUSE SLES 15 SP5

Features included in HPE modifications to SLES Kernel (COS base) - Deprecated with COS 25.9 releasing September 2025

• Additional hugepage sizes, which can improve performance for certain applications.
• Memory accounting and defragmentation improvements that optimize the amount of memory available to applications.
• Out of memory (OOM) killer adjustments for more reliable behavior when node memory runs low.
• Upstream changes not yet present in SLES (for example, error reporting improvements, performance tool capabilities).
• Extensions that are necessary to support the XPMEM kernel module.
• Optimizations which improve HPC benchmark and application performance.
• Enhancements to improve core file management for debugging multi-node jobs.

Value-add features provided by User Services Software Package

• Reliability, Availability, Serviceability (RAS):

  • PCIe link bandwidth monitoring
• File system capabilities:

  • Data Virtualization Service, an I/O forwarder that provides compute nodes with transparent access to file systems mounted on non-compute nodes within the system. The service provides access to a variety of file systems while maintaining a low memory footprint, providing fault tolerance, and reducing operating system noise and network activity.
  • Custom Lustre client and LNet software, which enables Lustre on compute nodes and enables the Data Virtualization Service data transfers.
• User application enhancements:

  • Application performance extensions
  • - XPMEM, a kernel module that enables direct shared memory access among process address spaces. It is used by HPE Cray MPI, SHMEM, and PGAS libraries to improve on-node performance which, in turn, improves overall application performance.
  • - libhugetlbfs library modifications to support additional hugepage sizes and optimize their use in application processes.
  • - Processor turbo-boost limiting support.
  • Performance tools support
  • - HPE Cray OS provides third party open-source content not available in SLES, such as msr-safe, a software package that provides user access to model-specific registers to support HPC performance tools.
  • User-level power management
  • - The Blade Power Management Controller Daemon Module (bpmcdmod) kernel module, which exposes power data counters (pm_counters) provided by the node controller to compute node applications.
  • - A plugin service to provide per-job power statistics to users.
• User Mode Container Support:

  • Enables open source HPC container runtime using shared file systems for access to containers.
  • Support for Podman and Singularity with enhancements for HPC delivered:
  • - Daemon-less container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI containers.
  • - Launched through WLMs (SLURM and PBS Pro).
• Workload Management and Application Launch:

  • Integration with workload management software such as:
  • - SLURM
  • - Altair PBS Professional
  • - PMIX
  • Application Task Orchestration and Management Service:
  • - Executes per job tasks and provides per job data to workload management software.
  • Parallel Application Launch Service:
  • - Application launch tool for Altair PBS Pro that supports the HPE Cray Programming Environment and HPE Slingshot networks.
• Integration with HPE Cray System Management:

  • HPE Cray OS provides packages that interoperate with the system management software to:
  • - Manage the compute node boot process.
  • - Manage security tokens necessary to access the system management services and endpoints.
  • - Provide compute node heartbeat status.
  • - Ensure hardware errors and system logs are stored in HPE Slingshot framework.
  • - Subscribe to and react to node state changes elsewhere in the system, to provide termination and failover/failback capabilities for higher-level compute node software.
  • - Provides node dump capability to compute and user access nodes.
  • - Configure compute node images and state via pre- and post-boot Ansible roles.
  • Micro-services
  • - The Content Projection Service, a micro-service that orchestrates scalable and fault tolerant access to image content from compute nodes. Examples of image content provided by the service includes the HPE Cray OS root file system, HPE Cray Programming Environment content, and analytics programming environment content. The Content Projection Service currently leverages data virtualization service as its data transfer layer.
  • - Node Memory Dump, a micro-service that orchestrates the retrieval and storage of compute node memory when a compute node is unhealthy. The service utilizes standard community dump tools, such as kdump.
• NCN Customization, a micro-service that orchestrates configuration of base operating system content on non-compute nodes.

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