Microsoft's CBL-Mariner Linux Shows Increasing HPC Interest

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner has been public now for about two years. CBL-Mariner has been in use for Microsoft's use-cases from their Azure cloud to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) while their newest release continues a recent trend of pointing towards a high performance computing (HPC) workloads focus too.

Coming just a week after the previous CBL-Mariner 2.0 update is one where they are adding four new packages and of them two are rather interesting: OpenMPI and PyTorch. Adding OpenMPI and PyTorch to Microsoft's CBl-Mariner package set is rather interesting and reflective of their possible increasing HPC interest in the distribution; OpenMPI being the popular MPI implementation and the PyTorch machine learning framework really not needing much introduction.

The CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230218 release also promoted smartmontools for SMART monitoring to core along with a Maven3 package without the Java JDK bindings. New to the "extended" packages is also Scotch as another interesting package of relevance for HPC workloads.

This latest Microsoft Linux distribution update also has a number of updated packages in light of security vulnerabilities, moving to a newer Linux 5.15 LTS revision, and various other updates.

The full list of changes with this new CBL-Mariner 2.0 update can be found via GitHub along with public download links. Whether Microsoft has some recent HPC ambition around CBL-Mariner or other plans, they have certainly have continued investing a lot into this Linux distribution.