Software upgrades

[kmcgregor123456]

Requests have been made to update our imaging hardware to a Puppet type system for systems management. This means replicating a single computer profile to all computer systems attached to the CVNR. This will take time to implement as puppet requires considerable implementation resources.

[kmcgregor123456]

We may want to switch to AWX Tower from Ansible. Investigating that option now.

Docker is another option, but I am not sure it is ideal.

[kmcgregor123456]

https://neurostars.org/t/using-docker-to-distribute-highres-neuroimaging-software/442

[MRphysics4life]

Docker sounds complicated and time consuming. If we can find a stable release of AWX, maybe that would work?

[kmcgregor123456]

There is a severe lack of homogeneity across clusters (for example, melodic works on one, but fails on another cluster ; matlab license is updated on one but not on others) that makes it very inconvenient for users to smoothly process data without having to switch (i.e. ssh into different cluster) just to accomplish one specific part of processing . It is understandable that some softwares that require expensive resources (for example, eddy CUDA) cannot be installed across all clusters, but maintaining homogeneity for other generic and relatively inexpensive software is logical and reasonable, and also important from the perspective of keeping our neuroimaging core users happy...after all a lot of them are working hard (without making too many excuses) to generate prelim data to support themselves or other investigators, generate products and papers for the lab and so on... :-)

[kmcgregor123456]

Upgrades are proceeding incrementally.

Currently at 18.04: ralph.birc.emory.edu genu.birc.emory.edu falx.birc.emory.edu qball3.birc.emory.edu

Currently at 14.04: lens.birc.emory.edu pano.birc.emory.edu qballs1,2,4

[kmcgregor123456]

qBall2 has been updated to Ubuntu 18.04