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

Sat Aug 18 13:36:02 UTC 2018

I am very happy to see we have a HPC SIG within CentOS project. I was
reading the SIG list[1] and did not find this SIG listed.

For those leading this SIG, please add into that list so everyone can
read more about your activities.

[1] https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup
On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 2:40 PM Adrian Reber <adrian at lisas.de> wrote:
>
> 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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