[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Joe Landman]

On 06/30/2014 11:27 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> I second Gavin.
>
> A lot of people have been mentioning LXC and Docker ans cures to this
> problem, and to paraphrase The Princess Bride, you keep using those
> words I don't think they mean what you think they mean. Docker and LXC
> are great for isolating running services: apache, DNS, etc. For the most
> part, we are stalking about user-space libraries and programs. I don't
> see how Docker and LXC could be used or provide any benefit in this
> context.

We can create a completely repeatable portable mechanism to distribute 
applications with full dependency chains as part of the distribution, 
across machines of any linux distro type, without impact core packages 
(which in the case of specific distros are often non-functional for 
anything but legacy system work) ... and you don't see the benefit to this?

Seriously?

Quick show of hands:  Anyone running an HPC system, ever run into, say, 
a dependency hell/nightmare due to a package requirement?

Response in the olden days was "tough we won't support it", and you had 
to figure out how to do it on your own (I did this with a number of 
packages on Cray's in the early 90's at PSC, that my group needed).  Or 
you package up what you need in a docker container, and run it, anywhere.




-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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Scalable Informatics, Inc.
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