[CentOS-devel] [!HPC] Request to join HPC Sig

[Adrian Reber]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 04:16:22PM +0000, Beth Lynn Eicher wrote:
> Please let me introduce myself. I am Beth Lynn Eicher with the FAS username of bethlynn. My background is a career in engineering systems deployments in research computing. I have worked at the Carnegie Mellon University, the Department of Energy, and the University of Chicago. Currently, I am a High Performance Computing consultant with clients like Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the University of Wyoming. There, I worked with Bridges, an XSEDE participating site.
> 
> Bridges uses CentOS 7 as do many other large installations. If you look at the top500, CentOS is the most popular named distribution. I hypothesize that CentOS is in the majority of the overall market share. It is a solid choice for all HPC systems.
> 
> The tools for use with HPC are often built by our greater community but seldom packaged by EPEL. I am unware of rpm builds for the following Free Software projects:
> https://github.com/OSC/Open-OnDemand
> https://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh
> https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/tutorials/multifactor-authentication
> https://github.com/TACC/Lmod
> 
> As an industry contributor from a small company, I am unencumbered by institutional politics which may cause reluctance to collaboration.   Therefore, I believe that I would be a very useful contributor to a HPC SIG within the CentOS community.
> 
> Yesterday, I spoke about cybersecurity in HPC at the CentOS Dojo. There we had a significant amount of energy around HPC and I would like to see this conversation continue. Today, I sought out the HPC SIG of CentOS. While there is evidence of activity, I have not seen anything more recent than Fall of 2017. Where is everybody?

Everybody is probably only me right now. Good to see more interest in
the HPC SIG.

Let me give an overview of the HPC SIG from my point of view.

When we initially created the HPC SIG my goal was to use OpenHPC as a
basis and provide those packages also from the HPC SIG, directly as part
of CentOS. I build all OpenHPC packages for aarch64, ppc64le and x86_64.

To better integrate the OpenHPC packages into CentOS I was using the
devtoolset-7 gcc instead of using the gcc-7 from OpenHPC.

With this done it would have not been much to have the packages on all
mirrors (which is one of the advantages of being a CentOS SIG) as well
as easy installation (yum install centos-hpc-sig-packages-something).

So there were a few advantages providing the OpenHPC packages as part of
the HPC SIG, but in the end I decided against it as I feared it would
divide the HPC community around CentOS further.

From my point of view it makes more sense to work together at OpenHPC
than to duplicate packaging efforts. OpenHPC has an excellent test
infrastructure to make sure everything they release works as expected.

It is also already a point where a lot of HPC experience is gathered
which I do not believe the CentOS HPC SIG can easily match.

Looking at the examples you provided:

 * Lmod is part of EPEL and as TACC is part of OpenHPC it is also the
   base of OpenHPC
 * Open-OnDemand was discussed in OpenHPC but it looks not as something
   that is easy to package as it has dependencies which are not provided
   by CentOS or EPEL, if upstream does not provide something easy to
   consume it would probably be a good candidate for containerization.
 * multifactor-authentication does not look like something to be
   packaged, it probably needs documentation how to set it up
 * Concerning hpn-ssh. Not sure about that. But PSC is also part of
   OpenHPC and other SSH based tools are also part of OpenHPC


My main point on not continuing with the HPC SIG is that I think that it
makes more sense to collaborate on the OpenHPC level. But that is also
only my opinion and if anybody else has different plans how the HPC SIG
could be used I am happy to help. Right now I do not see what it could
achieve.

		Adrian
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