Description

Currently, for the 2025 November HPC offering the HPC system role was used as following:

1. It was used to install third-party software from available RPMs, build unavailable HPC software from source, and tune OS for HPC workloads
2. It was shipped as part of the rhel-system-roles package in RHEL-9.6.z ONLY

Role Functionality Changes

For 2026 HPC offering, we will be using the RHEL HPC system role to tune the HPC image only.

You can see the tuning that the role does for 2025 November offering in the following Ansible tasks in the upstream repository on tag 0.3.1: https://github.com/linux-system-roles/hpc/blob/0.3.1/tasks/main.yml#L658-L705

Because we do not want to support or maintain the functionality of the role to build packages from source - the code that does this must be removed from the role. For the reason that this functionality was tested only once during November 2025 offering preparation against RHEL-9.6.z and will not be tested afterward. For the 2026 offering, packages will be built into RPMs outside the role.

The minimum will be to apply the tuning we used for the November 2025 release.

Shipping the Role Changes

The role was shipped as part of the rhel-system-roles package in RHEL-9.6.z ONLY.
For the 2026 offering, the role should be removed from rhel-system-roles package and instead be shipped as a separate RPM package in HPC channels.

What SSTs and Layered Product teams should review this?

sst-rhel-system-roles

HPC team