[Beowulf] Bright Cluster Manager

[Douglas Eadline]

Good points. I should have mentioned I was talking more about
"generic mainstream HPC" (like you say "cloud")
and not the performance cases where running
on bare metal is essential.

--
Doug

> On Thursday, 3 May 2018 11:04:38 PM AEST Douglas Eadline wrote:
>
>> Here is where I see it going
>>
>> 1. Computer nodes with a base minimal generic Linux OS
>>    (with PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS in kernel, added in 3.5)
>
> Depends on your containerisation method, some don't need to rely on that
> as
> the proactively disarm containers of dangerous abilities (setuid/setgid/
> capabilities) before the user gets near them.
>
> That said, even RHEL6 has support for that, so you'd be hard pressed to
> find an
> up-to-date system that doesn't have that ability.
>
>> 2. A Scheduler (that supports containers)
>>
>> 3. Containers (Singularity mostly)
>>
>> All "provisioning" is moved to the container. There will be edge cases
>> of
>> course, but applications will be pulled down from
>> a container repos and "just run"
>
> This then relies on people building containers that have the right
> libraries
> for the hardware you are using.  For instance I tried to use some
> Singularity
> containers on our system for MPI work but can't because the base OS is too
> old
> to include support for our OmniPath interconnect.
>
> The other issue is that it encourages people to build generic binaries
> rather
> than optimised binaries to broaden the systems the container can run on
> and/or
> because they don't have a proprietary compiler (or the distro has a
> version of
> GCC too old to optimise for the hardware).
>
> I would argue that there is a place for that sort of work, but that it's
> the
> cloud not so much HPC (as they're not trying to get the most out of the
> hardware).
>
> I'm conflicted on this because I also have great sympathies for the
> reproducibility side of the coin!
>
> All the best,
> Chris
> --
>  Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC
>
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-- 
Doug

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