[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Gavin W. Burris]

On Wed 06/25/14 03:54PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> On 06/25/2014 03:42 PM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
> >On Wed 06/25/14 05:29PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> >>RHEL doesn't cut it for these people: they know that they want later
> >>GCC / different commercial compilers / hand written assembly
> >
> >Any OS flavor will allow for all of these, including RHEL.  I'm not sure
> >how RHEL prevents any of this.
> 
> How much of the rest of your environment do you need to recompile to make
> sure the ABI/API changes don't introduce mismatched impedance bugs?

Build / install alternate software versions as needed.  SCL and modules
makes this easy.  

> Perl 5.8.x with the broken patches

Perl!?  Well there's your problem.

> You are aware that the good folks at Red Hat backport some useful things
> from later kernels ...

Yes, I am.  Bonus points for RHEL.

> No one is trying to tell you that you should look at other distros.  But I
> might suggest that others have perfectly valid reasons for consideration of
> alternative distros, and the arguments you are using to justify this one
> distro aren't quite as strong as you might think.

Sure.  Agreed.  Ten years ago, I was the guy that wanted to run the
latest Debian and re-compile kernels.  I've since come around to a more
enterprise mindset.

Cheers,
-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Project Leader for Research Computing
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania