Hi, Jonathan. Or you can just build software in a dedicated, version-named directory with the --prefix option. Many in HPC use the environment modules. Here is a good article about it: http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Environment-Modules
Cheers. On Sat 06/28/14 04:07PM +0200, Jonathan Aquilina wrote: > You guys are mentioning installing applications in a modular way, couldnt > that be achieved in a chroot environment or by using an LXC container? > > Regards. > > > On Wed 06/25/14 11:30AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote: > >> More often than not, commercial and closed source > >> applications are built and qualified (for support and guarantee of > >> functionality) against several very specific OS and library versions. > >> It is > >> rare, in my experience with this, that any of these are up-to-date > >> versions > >> of Red Hat or Red Hat derived distributions. > > > > In my experience, Red Hat is often the first, if not the only, supported > > OS for a commercial Linux application. This is due to the > > aforementioned lifecycle support and predictable ABI/API. > > > >> one unsupported platform is as good as the other, with the caveat that > >> one > >> needs to pay attention to the ease of management as well as other > >> things. > > > > Walking the well trodden path provides ease of management. I don't want > > to deploy a custom OS stack and have to throw my hands in the air when I > > hit a difficult bug that brings operations to a halt. I like hardware > > support. I like talking to the systems engineers. I have support on > > both Red Hat and CentOS (SL too). Deploying things like InfiniBand and > > pNFS is easy and commercially supported with RHEL. > > > >> This is why stateless machines, booting an instance with a particular OS > >> for > >> a particular job, is a *far* more reasonable and workable approach than > > > > Stateless is cool, but I choose my battles. Supporting multiple OS > > platforms is not a reasonable use of my time. If the other-OS > > application really is the end-all-be-all, then maybe, in a VM. I do > > have to check out Docker. > > > >> Err ... no. The center of mass of the market has moved on to the faster > > > > I'm saying that you shouldn't change the base OS and its APIs, but _do_ > > install the latest languages and applications in a modular way. > > Win-win. Programmers get to choose the latest tools, with a solid base > > for those software builds, plus hardware support. > > > > Cheers, > > -- > > Gavin W. Burris > > Senior Project Leader for Research Computing > > The Wharton School > > University of Pennsylvania > > _______________________________________________ > > 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 > > > > -- Gavin W. Burris Senior Project Leader for Research Computing The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania _______________________________________________ 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
