Release notes

Use these release notes to learn about the latest updates to IBM® Spectrum LSF that are grouped by date.

March 2024

22 March 2024

Existing DNS service instance and Custom resolver: You can now opt to use the existing DNS service instance to create the new DNS zones and also the existing custom resolver that is attached to the VPC.
Dedicated LSF client login node: With a dedicated LSF client login node, you can directly manage and monitor the cluster to submit jobs without accessing the management nodes. If LDAP is enabled, an LDAP user can also access the login node directly to manage the cluster. For additional security, you can use a bastion node as a jump (dedicated secure) host to access the login node.
File Storage for VPC support: IBM Cloud® File Storage for VPC is a zonal file storage offering that provides NFS-based file storage services. You can create file shares in an availability zone within a region. You can share them with multiple virtual server instances within the same zone or other zones in your region, across multiple VPCs. You can also limit access to a file share to a specific virtual server instance within a VPC and encrypt the data in transit.
Access the LSF Application center using LDAP users: LDAP users can now directly access the LSF Application Centre with only password authentication.
Customer-managed encryption for login/management worker nodes: You can now opt to use customer-managed encryption with your login and management nodes.
OpenLDAP integration for authentication: OpenLDAP is an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that provides centralized authentication and directory services. Once you have deployed your IBM Spectrum LSF cluster, you can integrate OpenLDAP with IBM Spectrum LSF. This way, you can use your existing LDAP infrastructure for user authentication, enabling more secure and streamlined user access to LSF.
Accessing LSF Application Center through VNC (remote) consoles: You can now access a remote console in LSF Application Centre by selecting VNC Consoles > Open my console.
VPC flow logs: Leverage IBM Cloud® flow logs for VPC to enable the collection, storage, and presentation of information about the IP traffic that travels to and from network interfaces within your VPC. Collecting data for VPC flow logs helps diagnose security group rules and denied flows.
Existing subnet support: You can now use the existing subnets for your management and compute nodes from one existing VPC.
DNS functionality support: Introduced use of DNS custom resolver for name resolution in place of static hostname to IP address mapping.

October 2023

16 October 2023

LSF daemon restart bug fix: A fix has been implemented to take care of job submission for creating dynamic hosts post LSF daemon restarted.
LSF failover bug fix: A fix has been implemented to take care of the failover case of the management node.

4 October 2023

LSF Application Center MariaDB installation bugfix: A fix has been implemented to resolve a bug that was preventing successful installation of LSF Application Center MariaDB.

May 2023

31 May 2023

Documentation enhancement: Integrating OpenLDAP with IBM Spectrum LSF: The newly added Integrating OpenLDAP with IBM Spectrum LSF tutorial walks you through how to use your existing LDAP infrastructure to provide centralized authentication and directory services.

March 2023

24 March 2023

LSF Application Center support: An option has been added to install the LSF Application Center module, which provides cluster users and administrators with an easy-to-use interface for job submission and monitoring.
Added LSF license check: The solution now automatically checks for a valid LSF license that is associated with ibm_customer_number, which has been added as a required variable.
Updated login node and NFS storage node stock images: An update was made to use a RHEL 8.6 stock image instead of a CentOS 7 stock image for the login node and the NFS storage node.
Custom image support: Documentation and scripts to make it easier for users to create and use their own custom images for LSF worker and Storage Scale storage nodes are now included in the solution.

January 2023

20 January 2023

Updated Spectrum LSF and Storage Scale default images: New default images were created for Spectrum LSF and Storage Scale along with their corresponding deployment value names. For Spectrum LSF, the image_name deployment value was updated to hpcc-lsf10-scale5131-rhel84-2-0-5, which replaced the previous default image hpcc-lsf10-scale5131-rhel84-092122-v2.; For Storage Scale, the scale_storage_image_name deployment value was updated to hpcc-scale5131-rhel84, which replaced the previous default image hpcc-scale5131-rhel84-jun0122-v1. For more information, see Deployment values.

September 2022

29 September 2022

Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI support: You now have the option to use the Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI as an alternative to the use of OpenMPI.

August 2022

09 August 2022

Dedicated hosts and Storage Scale support: You now have the option to use Storage Scale for shared storage that's accessible by the Spectrum LSF compute nodes. For more information, see Using Spectrum Scale storage. With the latest changes, RHEL 8.4 custom images take the place of RHEL 7.7 and CentOS 7.7 custom images with included optimizations for NFS. And, security group rules have been added to provide more secure access to the cluster by allowing SSH from only specific nodes. In addition, you now have the option to use dedicated hosts for static worker nodes. For more information, see Using dedicated hosts.
Bug fixes: Fixes were applied related to an HTTP data source body deprecation and an Ansible version 2.10 upgrade.
Deployment value removed: The region deployment value was removed. This was due to the fact that the zone deployment value naming convention allows for the region to be easily extracted from it.

March 2022

30 March 2022

Bug fix: The custom image lookup error has been fixed.

February 2022

02 February 2022

Security update: Changes were made to the post-provisioning scripts to mitigate the Polkit Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034).

October 2021

18 October 2021

Bug fix: A fix has been provided for the error "No image found with name" if the image name is not found in the image mapping file.

September 2021

22 September 2021

LSF enhancements and improvements: You can now use an existing VPC. On the back end, Terraform has been updated to version 0.14, hyperthreading is enabled by default, and parallelism is now supported on Schematics destroy operations to help overall performance.

June 2021

24 June 2021

Introducing IBM Spectrum LSF for HPC workloads: You can now use IBM Spectrum LSF as a workload manager with automated deployment of HPC clusters. The clusters are configured for auto scaling and use the cluster compute node configuration that you select.