[Beowulf] Oh.. IBM eats Red Hat

[Joe Landman]

On 10/29/18 12:44 PM, David Mathog wrote:

[...]

> It turns out that getting up to date compilers and libraries has become
>> quite important for those working on large distributed code bases.
>
> Libraries are harder.  Try to build a newer one than ships with CentOS 
> and it is not uncommon to end up having to build many other libraries 
> (recursive dependencies) or to hit a brick wall when a kernel 
> dependency surfaces.


This was my point about building things in a different tree.  I do this 
with tools I use in https://github.com/joelandman/nlytiq-base , which 
gives me a consistent set of tools regardless of the platform.

Unfortunately, some of the software integrates Conda, which makes it 
actually harder to integrate what you need.  Julia, for all its 
benefits, is actually hard to build packages for such that they don't 
use Conda.


> In biology apps of late there is a distressing tendency for software 
> to only be supported in a distribution form which is essentially an 
> entire OS worth of libraries packaged with the one (often very small) 
> program I actually want to run.  (See "bioconda".)  Most of these 
> programs will build just fine from source even on CentOS 6, but often 
> the only way to download a binary for them is to accept an additional 
> 1Gb (or more) of other stuff.


Yeah, this has become common across many fields.  Containers become the 
new binaries, so you don't have to live with/accept the platform based 
restrictions.  This was another point of mine.  And Greg K @Sylabs is 
getting free exposure here :D


-- 
Joe Landman
e: joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
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