Upcoming changes for R 4.6 and RStudio 2026
The ITSR support team will be making some changes to R and RStudio on Apocrita in August 2026. Some action will be required by users, so please read the below carefully.
news¶
Queue scheduler announcement
Updated March 2026
We have updated this post with answers to some common questions.
For the lifetime of the Apocrita HPC cluster, the queue scheduler software we have been using to allocate jobs to individual compute nodes has been a variant of Grid Engine. Over the past few years, the company who own this software has changed hands a few times, and we feel that development has stagnated in terms of features, while bugs have not been resolved to our satisfaction.
Reducing the maximum runtime for Open OnDemand sessions to 24 hours
On Monday 3rd November 2025, we will be implementing a change to reduce the maximum runtime for all Open OnDemand applications from 240 hours (10 days) to 24 hours.
Rocky 9 benefits
The majority of the cluster has now been upgraded to Rocky 9 and the remaining CentOS 7 nodes will be updated in due course. There may be some users that are still hesitant to move over, but there are a few reasons why you should.
The next era for Apocrita is here
For much of the year we have been working on a major project to upgrade Apocrita to a new operating system, (Rocky Linux 9, hereafter known as Rocky 9). As part of the project, we have deployed a new package building tool to help us recompile all of the research applications to work on the new system.
The majority of the cluster has now been upgraded to Rocky 9. The remaining CentOS 7 nodes will be updated in due course.
High Performance Computing (HPC) events from late 2024
2024 has been productive year in the outreach and education of HPC to different schools at Queen Mary University of London. We have formed alliances with different managers and PIs from various schools within the University who understand the value that HPC can add to their scientific research. We are pleased to share our latest event in 2024:
Upgraded highmem nodes on Apocrita
The Apocrita highmem nodes have just been upgraded so that they contain newer
CPUs with more modern instruction sets.
Modules Update December 2023
Since the last module update in December 2022, we have:
- added/moved 61 modules to production
- added 2 modules to the development environment
- deprecated 3 modules
- deleted 12 modules
Promoting Linux and High Performance Computing at QMUL
The High Performance Computing (HPC) team is keen to spread Linux and HPC knowledge at Queen Mary University of London. Keeping in mind our vision to support excellence in research, our valuable efforts have been fruitful this year. Our achievements include:
Update of environment modules to version 5.3.0
We have deployed the latest version of Environment Modules (5.3.0) across the cluster on all frontend and compute nodes.