It is definitely worth upgrading to v1.8+. You don’t need to compile it yourself from source on the cluster (but this is what I do), but I think the below will work:
cd ~
wget https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/linux/x64/1.8/julia-1.8.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xvf julia-1.8.2-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
echo "alias julia=~/julia-1.8.2/bin/julia" >> ~/.bashrc
This means that when you type julia in bash, it will redirect it to the right executable. You may want to remove any module loads for julia if you are using environment files.
p.s. You can of course change the version to the one you want.