[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC
From: |
myglc2 |
Subject: |
Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC |
Date: |
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 18:01:11 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.1 (gnu/linux) |
On 10/26/2016 at 14:08 Ricardo Wurmus writes:
> At the MDC we’re using SGE and users specify their software environment
> in the job script. The software environment is a Guix profile, so the
> job script usually contains a line to source the profile’s
> “etc/profile”, which has the effect of setting up the required
> environment variables.
Cool. How do you deal with the tendency of user's profiles to be "moving
targets?" IOW, I am wondering how one would reproduce a result at a
later date when one's profile has "changed"?
> I don’t know of anyone who uses VMs or VM images to specify software
> environments.
One rationale I can think of for VM images is to "archive" them along
with the analysis result to provide brute-force reproducibility.
An example I know of is a group whose cluster consists of VMs on VMware.
The VMs run a mix of OSes provisioned with varying levels of resource
(e.g. #CPUs, amount of memory, installed software).
>> Based on my experiments with Guix/Debian, GuixSD, VMs, and VM images it
>> is not obvious to me which of these levels of abstraction is
>> appropriate.
>
> FWIW we’re using Guix on top of CentOS 6.8. The store is mounted
> read-only on all cluster nodes.
Nice. Do you attempt to "protect" your users from variations in the
CentOS config?
>> The most forward-thinking group that I know discarded their cluster
>> hardware a year ago to replace it with starcluster
>> (http://star.mit.edu/cluster/). Starcluster automates the creation,
>> care, and feeding of a HPC clusters on AWS using the Grid Engine
>> scheduler and AMIs. The group has a full-time "starcluster jockey" who
>> manages their cluster and they seem quite happy with the approach. So
>> you may want to consider starcluster as a model when you think of
>> cluster management requirements.
>
> When using starcluster are software environments transferred to AWS on
> demand? Does this happen on a per-job basis? Are any of the
> instantiated machines persistent or are they discarded after use?
In the application I refer to the cluster is kept spun up. I am not
sure if they have built a custom Amazon VM-image (AMI) or if they start
with a "stock" AMI and configure the compute hosts during the spin up.
- Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC, (continued)
Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC, Thomas Danckaert, 2016/10/19
Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC, myglc2, 2016/10/24
Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC, Eric Bavier, 2016/10/26