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 > _______________________________________________ > CentOS-devel mailing list > CentOS-devel at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel