On Thu, Sep 06, 2018 at 03:13:53PM +0200, Peter Kjellström wrote:
On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 23:45:17 +0200 Adrian Reber adrian@lisas.de wrote:
On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 11:41:32AM -0700, Paul Graydon wrote:
There was some email conversation on this list a couple of weeks ago about the HPC SIG, but it didn't really seem to go anywhere or have any solid conclusion, other than "join #centos-devel". Between some freenode instability/spam protections etc. some issues with my usual persistent session, and just sheer quantity of conversation happening there, it's somewhat hard to figure out where anything sits. I didn't see any obvious signs of further conversation there, but there's a good chance I missed it. If there was further conversation and someone would be able to point me towards it off list, I'd love to read it.
As far as I am aware, I am the only 'active' person in the HPC SIG and have not seen any further HPC discussions.
As a cloud provider that provides high spec bare metal servers to customers, we're finding a lot of usage and interest from customers with various forms of HPC workloads, everything from GROMACs to Hadoop and beyond. CentOS, likewise, continues to be a popular distribution for our customers, across every hardware and virtual machine specification. If there's ideas on how to make HPC better on CentOS, I'd love to be part of the conversation, and see if there are opportunities to help.
Right now I still think that OpenHPC is a very good starting point to collaborate on HPC packages for CentOS. Especially if you are interested in bringing in additional packages like GROMACs.
I think application level packages (or the more general scientific software building and providing question) is better addressed by something like easybuild or spack.
Yes, that is why OpenHPC includes easybuild and spack. But I also think that there is value in application level packages coming from something like OpenHPC if the user base is large enough. Especially if reading the motivation of Paul, being 'a cloud provider that provides high spec bare metal servers to customers', pre-built software might be more interesting then build from source like easybuild or spack (although I think spack does (or will do) provide precompiled binaries, which makes it more similar to OpenHPC again...).
It makes more sense to me that hpc-sig and/or OpenHPC works with more system near components (file system support, batch systems, module systems, node cloning / provisioning, ...).
And that is one of the main features provided by OpenHPC.
Adrian