Fabian Updates Summer 2025

We will be updated most of the components of the Fabian service before the start of the Academic Year. This includes

1. Upgrading open ondemand portal to the latest release

   This will fix the issue with the terminal application timing out far too quickly, once upgraded terminals will stay alive for up to 2 hours provided you use them every 30 minutes

2. Updading the cluster

   This will provide some libraries used by packages that we currently struggle to support. The new cluster will be based upon Ubuntu 24.04. Visual Studio remoting will work once more and we will be able to offer MATLAB 2025a and newer versions of RStudio.

3. Updated desktop service

   The operating system used by the desktop service will be moved to Ubuntu 24.04 which should prevent the many outages the desktop service has suffered during the year

4. New alternative desktop applications service

   A new service where applications run ono a desktop directly on compute nodes will be provided. This will isolate users applications from each other so that the failure of one users desktop session does not impact on the other users of the desktop applications

5. New filesystem

   We will move the storage shared by the cluster to a lustre based service. This will automatically transition unused files to cheaper cold storage in aws s3 reducing cost and leaving us more budget to spend on compute server

tip

If you have any queries or concerns, please contact us via the teams channel.