[Beowulf] hpl size problems
Joe Landman
landman at scalableinformatics.com
Tue Sep 27 08:20:15 PDT 2005
Robert G. Brown wrote:
> Greg M. Kurtzer writes:
> (regarding what Mark Hahn writes:-)
>
[...]
>>> > It reminds me of chapter 1 of sysadmin 101: Only install what you
>>> *need*
>>>
>>> sure, but that's not inherent to your system, and unless you had some
>>> pretty
>>> godaweful stuff installed before, it's hard to see that explanation...
>
> Yes.
This is actually why Warewulf is quite nice. For those situations where
I cannot use it, I have rolled a very lightweight version of SuSE (and
will do the same with Centos).
The problem is dependency-hell. Not the yum-solving variety, just the
requirements that some packages seem to have where they have 10+
pre-requisites, which themselves have 10+ prerequisites.... pretty soon
you are finding yourself installing doxygen and tex in order to get
something with a man page section ...
The main distro vendors don't do a very good job of keeping a low
dependency radius. You wind up with fairly huge minimum trees pretty
quickly.
<slight aside>
As for TeX, if you are installing it to your compute nodes, then I hope
that one of your main tasks will be to crunch lots of documentation. I
know those post script placements can be somewhat challenging. It sure
as heck doesn't make sense to install it (and openoffice components for
that matter) to cluster nodes. I see this all the time, and one of the
more popular cluster "distributions" does this.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. I like the
install-minimum and add-needed-bits philosophy more than I like the
everything-including-the-kitchen-sink. Lots of services seem to get
activated when you install the-kitchen-sink.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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