[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Gavin W. Burris]

On Wed 06/25/14 07:14PM -0400, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote:
> I ended up doing very crazy root-stealing, chroot-establishing things to get
> my science done in my PhD.  If you prevent intelligent people from doing
> their work, they are going to be your worst nightmare.  Don't kid yourselves
> if you think you are doing anyone favors by providing super-static OS
> environments like RHEL for your users.  You are just being lazy (and not the
> good kind of programmer lazy).

I don't think your IT staff is lazy for saying no to some requests.  It
is unreasonable in the extreme to expect systems-level access on a
shared production system.  If you want to operate at that level, you
should consider building a dedicated resource, possibly rolling cloud
image or VMs.  I mean, unless you are also paying the bills, managing
staff time, attending weekly sysadmin meetings, and fielding support
tickets.

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