Kestrel Operating System Upgrades

Oct. 16, 2026

The transition from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 to RHEL 9 is moving ahead rapidly.

Work to upgrade the majority of compute nodes (CPU and GPU) will begin on Tuesday, Oct. 20, with an expected completion date by Friday, Oct. 23.  

The remainder of compute nodes will be converted by Monday, Nov. 2, at which point the RHEL 8 pending job queue will be fully purged.

Job submissions to the RHEL 8 queue will be stopped on Oct. 20. Job submissions will only be available on kl3, kl5, and kd7 after this date and will go into the RHEL 9 node queue.

The remaining login nodes will be available, but will not accept job submissions until they are migrated to RHEL 9. An email announcement will be made once the migration of all login nodes is complete.

Please visit the Kestrel RHEL 9 Upgrade documentation page for more information, or contact HPC-Help@nlr.gov for questions or assistance regarding the migration.