[Beowulf] RIP CentOS 8

[John Hearns]

Great vision Doug.
May I also promote EESSI  https://www.eessi-hpc.org/
(the European part may maagically be transformed into something else soon)

On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 18:57, Douglas Eadline <deadline at eadline.org> wrote:

>
>
> Some thoughts an this issue and future HPC
>
> First, in general it is poor move by CentOS, a community
> based distribution that has just killed their community.
> Nice work.
>
> Second, and most importantly, CentOS will not matter to HPC.
> (and maybe other sectors as well) Distributions will become
> second class citizens to containers.  All that is needed is a
> base OS to run the container (think Singularity)
>
> Years ago in the early days of Warewwulf, Greg Kurtzer
> (Warewulf/Singularity) talked about the idea of bundling the
> essential/minimal OS and libraries with applications in custom
> Warewulf VNFS image. The scheduler would then boot the application
> image -- everything works. Indeed, in my Limulus systems all
> Warewulf VNFS images and kernel bootstraps are in RPM files.
> Users can load a new VNFS using Yum (and some basic Warewulf
> provision commands)
>
> Now jump ahead to containers and HPCng (https://hpcng.org/)
>
> An open source project will release a container that "contains"
> everything thing it needs to run (along with the container recipe)
> Using Singularity you can also sign the container to assure
> provenance of the code. The scheduler runs containers. Simple.
>
> Software Vendors will gladly do the same. Trying to support
> multiple distribution goes away. Applications show up in
> tested containers. The scheduler runs containers. Things just work,
> less support issues for the vendor. Simple.
>
> The need to maintain library version trees and Modules for
> goes away, Of course if are developer writing your own application,
> you need specific libraries, but not system wide. Build the
> application in your working directly, include any specific libraries
> you need in the local source tree and fold it all into a container.
>
> Joe Landman also comments on this topic in his blog (does not seem
> to be showing up for me today, however)
>
>
> https://scalability.org/2020/12/the-future-of-linux-distributions-in-the-age-of-docker-and-k8s/
>
> Bottom line, it is all good, we are moving on.
>
> --
> Doug
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > It looks like the CentOS project has announced the end of CentOS 8 as a
> > version that tracked RHEL for the end of 2021, it will be replaced by
> > the CentOS stream which will run ahead of RHEL8. CentOS 7 is unaffected
> > (though RHEL7 only has 3 more years of life left).
> >
> > https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
> >
> >  > The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the
> >  > next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild
> >  > of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which
> >  > tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release. CentOS Linux 8, as
> >  > a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021. CentOS Stream
> >  > continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development)
> >  > branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
> >  >
> >  > Meanwhile, we understand many of you are deeply invested in
> >  > CentOS Linux 7, and we’ll continue to produce that version through
> >  > the remainder of the RHEL 7 life cycle.
> >
> > I always thought that Fedora was meant to be that upstream for RHEL, but
> > perhaps the arrangement now will be Fedora -> CentOS -> RHEL.
> >
> > I wonder where this leaves the Lustre project, currently they only
> > support RHEL7/CentOS7 as the server, and more interestingly, people who
> > build Lustre appliances on top of CentOS.
> >
> > Then there's the question of projects like OpenHPC who've only just
> > announced support for CentOS8 (and OpenSuSE15). They could choose to
> > track CentOS Stream instead, probably without too much effort.
> >
> > I do wonder if this opens the door for the return of something like
> > Scientific Linux.
> >
> > All the best,
> > Chris
> > --
> > Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Berkeley, CA, USA
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>
>
> --
> Doug
>
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