[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Jonathan Aquilina]

Then cant you say the same about virtualization technologies such as kvm
xen vmware and hyperV?

> 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.
>
> --
> Prentice
>
>
> On 06/30/2014 08:18 AM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
>> 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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>
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