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**ENHANCEMENTS**
- Add new configuration section `Scheduling/SlurmSettings/ExternalSlurmdbd` to connect the cluster to an external Slurmdbd.
- Allow build-image to be run in an isolated network.
- Add support for Amazon Linux 2023.
- Add support for `price-capacity-optimized` as an `AllocationStrategy`.
- Add validator to prevent the use of Placement Groups with Capacity Blocks.
**CHANGES**
- CentOS 7 is no longer supported.
- Upgrade Cinc Client to version to 18.4.12 from 18.2.7.
- Upgrade munge to version 0.5.16 (from 0.5.15).
- Upgrade Pmix to 5.0.2 (from 4.2.9).
- Upgrade third-party cookbook dependencies:
- apt-7.5.22 (from apt-7.5.14)
- openssh-2.11.12 (from openssh-2.11.3)
- Remove third-party cookbook: selinux-6.1.12.
- Upgrade EFA installer to `1.32.0`.
- Efa-driver: `efa-2.8.0-1`
- Efa-config: `efa-config-1.16-1`
- Efa-profile: `efa-profile-1.7-1`
- Libfabric-aws: `libfabric-aws-1.21.0-1`
- Rdma-core: `rdma-core-50.0-1`
- Open MPI: `openmpi40-aws-4.1.6-3` and `openmpi50-aws-5.0.2-12`
- Upgrade NVIDIA driver to version 535.183.01 (from 535.154.05).
- Upgrade Python to 3.9.19 (from 3.9.17).
- Upgrade Intel MPI Library to 2021.12.1.8 (from 2021.9.0.43482).
**BUG FIXES**
- Fix Data Repository Associations configuration to make `AutoExportPolicy` and `AutoImportPolicy` optional.
- Fixed an issue during cluster deletion that now completes compute fleet cleanup when instances are either in shutting-down or terminated state.
This is to avoid cluster deletion failures for instance types with longer termination cycles.
- Allow cloudwatch dashboard to be enabled and alarms to be disabled in the `Monitoring` section of the cluster config.
- Allow ParallelCluster Custom Resource to suppress validators using `PclusterCluster/SuppressValidators`.
- Removing `/etc/profile.d/pcluster.sh` so that it's not executed at every user login and
`cfn_bootstrap_virtualenv` is not added in PATH environment variable.
- Fix ParallelCluster API spec by replacing field `failureReason` with `failures` in `DescribeCluster` response.
- Fix ParallelCluster API spec by adding the CloudFormation stack status that were missing:
`IMPORT_*`, `REVIEW_IN_PROGRESS` and `UPDATE_FAILED`.
- Fix an issue that prevented cluster updates from including EFS filesystems with encryption in transit.
- Fix an issue that prevented slurmctld and slurmdbd services from restarting on head node reboot when
EFS is used for shared internal data.
- On Ubuntu systems, remove default logrotate configuration for cloud-init log files that clashed with the
configuration coming from Parallelcluster.
- Fix image build failure with RHEL 8.10 or newer.