August 2025 Software Update - Important Information
During August 2025 maintenance (5th August,2025), Setonix nodes have been reimaged with SLES15 SP6 which contains important security patches. The ROCm driver has also been updated to a newer driver (6.10.5) that supports ROCm 6.1 through 6.4. This ensures researchers can continue to make use of the latest GPU features and has allowed an updated software stack built against ROCm 6.3.0 to be provided with new software versions.
The new software stack is based on the new Cray Programming Environment (CPE) 25.03 which includes newer MPI libraries and newer versions of GCC (14.2.0) and Cray compilers (19.0.0). In preparation for this, Pawsey has prepared a new software stack, which became available immediately after the maintenance via the default pawseyenv/2025.08 module. The purpose of this page is to consolidate in one place all the important changes, highlights and recommended actions.
Researcher actions
Changes in the CPE, Cray-MPICH, and Pawsey provided software stack apply immediately to all users after the August 2025 maintenance. Therefore, every researcher should follow these steps to “upgrade” their own tools and scripts towards the new conditions:
Check for version changes in the system-wide software stack provided by Pawsey and HPE for the tools that are part of your workflows.
Check for the correct execution of any software managed by the research group. In case of failure, then reinstall (see sections below).
Containers that inject glibc (v2.38) from the Setonix OS but were built on old OS versions will most likely fail to run. These containers will need to be rebuilt using a newer OS base to avoid the incompatibility. Pawsey has rebuilt supported container images for Setonix using Ubuntu 24.04, but users may also need to rebuild their own. Researchers using Pawsey-provided container images might need to pull the updated versions which are now available from the repository (https://quay.io/organization/pawsey ).
Update Slurm batch scripts to reflect the new versions of software
ROCm sofware compatability
If your research group's software was built against ANY of the ROCm versions from the old,2024.05, software stack, so5.4.6through5.7.3, it will most probably fail now, as the ROCm
Driver, as noted above, has been updated.
This newer Driver only supports ROCm 6.1 through 6.4, and the new,2025.08, software stack currently provides6.2.0through6.4.1,where the latter is the default.
You may, by swapping to the oldest,6.2.0, version get a ROCm environment closer to that in
the old, 5.x series, but required compatabilities may still not be there.
The best long-term solution is to rebuild software that uses ROCm.
(Please refer to the general documentation if you are unsure on how to proceed on any of the proposed steps.)
Further details about the changes are provided in the following sections. We are also including a section at the end for listing “known issues” that have been discovered after maintenance (and that we are working to solve).
What is new in CPE 25.03
The Cray Programming Environment (CPE) is the programming environment provided by the vendor on Setonix. It has been updated to version 25.03 and includes an updated MPI library, newer versions of GCC (14.2.0) and newer Cray compiler (19.0.0). We still recommend against using the AOCC compiler and programming environment (PrgEnv-aocc) due to on-going issues.
Software stack
The new default version of the software stack is 2025.08, replacing the previous default 2024.05 software stack. The new software stack has been installed using a newer Spack major release, v0.23.1. We have compiled several packages using the Cray compiler and updated the versions of most packages in both the GNU and Cray programming environments. Users can check for the new versions of the software they used via the modulecommands like:
module avail <moduleName>In the following tables there is a complete list of changes for the GNU programming environment: