[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:54:34 +0200, you wrote:

>Rapidly changing distros is mentioned in the response. What would classify
>a rapidly changing distro. 

Rapidly changing would be Fedora/Mint/Ubuntu with their 6 month
release schedules, as opposed to Red Hat or the long term release
version of Mint/Ubuntu, or Debian.

The 6 month cycle is as short as you can get and still have any sort
of realistic amount of testing.

>Take ubuntu is there six month release cycle
>quick enough and even then they still wont have the latest versions of
>software.

But they will have new enough versions of languages and libraries so
that you can easily compile almost anything else (that is either not
in the distribution, or not new enough).

>New versions of software are being released daily and please correct if im
>wrong but most distros do not release anything newer shortly there after
>it coming out.

Actually, in most cases there is about a 2 month prior to release cut
off to allow for testing and bug fixing prior to release.

But in most cases this is not an issue.  The issue is with Red Hat or
any other LTS type release where the languages (either compiler or
interpreter) and libraries are several generations out of date.

It comes down to what you want/need.  There are parts of the software
industry where you don't want change, once you get something working
you want it kept that way.  For these people Red Hat and its
competitors are ideal, and they provide Red Hat with a very good
revenue stream.

For others they need newer compilers or libraries, so they need to put
up with the short support lifecyles of a Fedora/Mint/Ubuntu in order
to get those features (or luck into and freeze on a newly released Red
Hat/LTS).

Or, more likely in the HPC case, the people writing the software don't
necessarily need the newer stuff but happen to be using it because
what they do need is the newer features of the desktop environment (or
hardware support for laptop/etc)  and drag in a newer
Perl/gcc/gfortran/etc. as a side effect of that need.