On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Andrew M.A. Cater <amaca...@galactic.demon.co.uk> wrote: > RHEL doesn't cut it for these people: they know that they want later > GCC / different commercial compilers / hand written assembly - a later > kernel with a smarter scheduler ... > > SCL really doesn't work - it's stil not up to it.
One way to deal with this is to separate user applications from the OS, as much as possible. And compilers could be considered as user applications. You can just use a very minimal OS on your compute nodes, then compile and install all the user facing bits in a shared location. You hand an environment modules system to the users and off they go. Systems such as EasyBuild (https://hpcugent.github.io/easybuild/) aim to facilitate this by allowing easy compilation and installation of scientific software (based on descriptive specification files, à la Gentoo ebuilds), including dependencies, and by automatically generating environment modules. This way, you don't really care what the underlying OS is. You can have as many versions of GCC, Python, R, Perl, Ruby or anything installed alongside each other with no side effect, as long as you load the right module before running your job. It's like a distro-agnostic ebuild system. You can keep the distro the hardware vendor recommends to retain support (for interconnect drivers, parallel filesystems and such) while making your users happy with the newest versions of the software they need^Wwant. Cheers, -- Kilian _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
