[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Gavin W. Burris]

Hi, Jonathan.

Or you can just build software in a dedicated, version-named directory
with the --prefix option.  Many in HPC use the environment modules.
Here is a good article about it:
http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Environment-Modules

Cheers.

On Sat 06/28/14 04:07PM +0200, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
> You guys are mentioning installing applications in a modular way, couldnt
> that be achieved in a chroot environment or by using an LXC container?
> 
> Regards.
> 
> > On Wed 06/25/14 11:30AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> >> More often than not, commercial and closed source
> >> applications are built and qualified (for support and guarantee of
> >> functionality) against several very specific OS and library versions.
> >> It is
> >> rare, in my experience with this, that any of these are up-to-date
> >> versions
> >> of Red Hat or Red Hat derived distributions.
> >
> > In my experience, Red Hat is often the first, if not the only, supported
> > OS for a commercial Linux application.  This is due to the
> > aforementioned lifecycle support and predictable ABI/API.
> >
> >> one unsupported platform is as good as the other, with the caveat that
> >> one
> >> needs to pay attention to the ease of management as well as other
> >> things.
> >
> > Walking the well trodden path provides ease of management.  I don't want
> > to deploy a custom OS stack and have to throw my hands in the air when I
> > hit a difficult bug that brings operations to a halt.  I like hardware
> > support.  I like talking to the systems engineers.  I have support on
> > both Red Hat and CentOS (SL too).  Deploying things like InfiniBand and
> > pNFS is easy and commercially supported with RHEL.
> >
> >> This is why stateless machines, booting an instance with a particular OS
> >> for
> >> a particular job, is a *far* more reasonable and workable approach than
> >
> > Stateless is cool, but I choose my battles.  Supporting multiple OS
> > platforms is not a reasonable use of my time.  If the other-OS
> > application really is the end-all-be-all, then maybe, in a VM.  I do
> > have to check out Docker.
> >
> >> Err ... no.  The center of mass of the market has moved on to the faster
> >
> > I'm saying that you shouldn't change the base OS and its APIs, but _do_
> > install the latest languages and applications in a modular way.
> > Win-win.  Programmers get to choose the latest tools, with a solid base
> > for those software builds, plus hardware support.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > --
> > Gavin W. Burris
> > Senior Project Leader for Research Computing
> > The Wharton School
> > University of Pennsylvania
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> 
> 

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