On 06/24/2014 10:54 PM, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote: [...]
So, unless you are the end-all-be-all in the use-case like I was for my PhD (my cluster/hardware/network, my software, my Gentoo build, my kernel configs, etc), I would sadly be forced to say Gentoo is a bad choice for general HPC builds. Too few people fully understand and appreciate it, and far more are going to be pissed about how their old and crusty release of whatever isn't available 8 years after it came out just because they have to keep their similarly old/crusty/broken academic code-mess up-to-date. Enough boo-hooing does beat rationality here.
My inflation adjusted 2 centi-dollars are rather the opposite. Things like Docker, when sufficiently mature, will enable you to run pretty much any environment you need. The reach through to the underlying hardware is far less of an issue with that, than SR-IOV based kvm/xen cut-through.
Its now a SMOP for Docker to be 'sufficiently mature' but I'd bet that by SC14, we could be swapping war stories of what works/doesn't work. And given the velocity of it, I'd say its probably maturing far faster than the pure HPC community needs.
So if you want to do Gentoo JEOS nodes, go ahead. We are focusing more on Debian with our kernel, drivers, user-space bits, code ... ourselves. but Gentoo (and for a short while, LFS) was a possibility. There's nothing wrong with it per-se, albeit a sharper learning curve to get productive. This said, some of the best tools we use (System Rescue CD) are Gentoo based. Others are Debian based.
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