March 2024 Maintenance Details

Hello Hyak Users,

For our March maintenance we had some notable changes we wanted to share with the community.

Login Node

Over the last several months the login node has been crashing on occasion. We have been monitoring and dissecting the kernel dumps from each crash and this behavior seems to be highly correlated with VS Code Remote-SSH extension activity. To prevent node instability, we have upgraded the storage drivers to the latest version. If you are a VS Code user and connect to klone via Remote-SSH, we have some recommendations to help limit the possibility that your work would cause system instability on the login node.

Responsible Usage of VS Code Extension Remote-SSH

While developing your code with connectivity to the server is a great usage of our services, connecting directly to the login node via the Remote-SSH extension will result in VS Code server processes running silently in the background and leading to node instability. As a reminder, we prohibit users running processes on the login node.

New Documentation

The steps discussed here for responsible use of VS Code have been added to our documentation. Please review the solutions for connecting VS Code to Hyak.

1. Check which processes are running on the login node, especially if you have been receiving klone usage violations when you are not aware of jobs running. Look for vscode-server among the listed processes.

   $ ps aux | grep UWNetID

2. If you need to develop your code with connectivity to VS Code, use a ProxyJump to open a connection directly to a compute node. Step 1 documentation. and then use the Remote-SSH extension to connect to that node through VS Code on your local machine, preserving the login node for the rest of the community. Step 2 documentation.

3. Lastly, VS Code’s high usage is due to it silently installing its built in features into the user's home directory ~/.vscode on klone enabling intelligent autocomplete features. This is a well known issue, and there is a solution that involves disabling the @builtin TypeScript plugin from the VS Code on your local machine. Here is a link to a blog post about the issue and the super-easy solution. Disabling @builtin TypeScript will reduce your usage of the shared resources and avoid problems.

In addition to the upgrade of the storage driver, we performed updates to security packages.

Training Opportunities

We wanted to make you aware of two training opportunities with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. If you are interested in picking up some additional skills and experience in HPC, check this blog post.

Questions?

If you have any questions for us, please reach out to the team by emailing help@uw.edu with Hyak in the subject line.