spack VS ohpc

> Are we talking about the same autotools?

Yes. Instead of figuring out how to do something particular with every single software package, I can do a --with-foo or --without-bar or --prefix=/opt/baz-1.2.3, and be fairly confident that it will work the way I want.

Certainly with package managers or (FreeBSD) Ports a lot is taken care of behind the scenes, but the above would also help the package/port maintainers as well. Lately I've been using Spack for special-needs compiles, but maintainer ease also helps there, but there are still cases one a 'fully manual' compile is still done.

> Suffice it to say, I prefer to work with handwritten makefiles.

Having everyone 'roll their own' system would probably be worse, because any "mysteriously failure" then has to be debugged specially for each project.

Have you tried Spack?

* https://spack.io

* https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Well, good luck with that, cause it's broken.

Previous release miscompiled Python [1]

Current release miscompiles bison [2]

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/38724

[2] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/37172#issuecomment-181...

gh is available via Homebrew, MacPorts, Conda, Spack, Webi, and as a…

> I can't count the number of times I've seen people say "md5 is fine for use case xyz" where in some counterintuitive way it wasn't fine.

I can count many more times that people told me that md5 was "broken" for file verification when, in fact, it never has been.

My main gripe with the article is that it portrays the entire legal profession as "backwards" and "deeply negligent" when they're not actually doing anything unsafe -- or even likely to be unsafe. And "tech" knows better. Much of tech, it would seem, has no idea about the use cases and why one might be safe or not. They just know something's "broken" -- so, clearly, we should update.

> Just use a safe one, even if you think you "don't need it".

Here's me switching 5,700 or so hashes from md5 to sha256 in 2019: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/13185

Did I need it? No. Am I "compliant"? Yes.

Really, though, the main tangible benefit was that it saved me having to respond to questions and uninformed criticism from people unnecessarily worried about md5 checksums.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/var/spack/repos/...

In Spack [1] we can express all these constraints for the dependency solver, and we also try to always re-cythonize sources. The latter is because bundled cythonized files are sometimes forward incompatible with Python, so it's better to just regenerate those with an up to date cython.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/

You want to look at the tools used for HPC systems, these are generally very well tried and tested and can be setup for single machine usage. Remote access - we use ssh, but web interfaces such as Open On Demand exist - https://openondemand.org/. For managing Jobs, Slurm is currently the most popular option - https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html. For a module system (to load software and libraries per user), Spack is a great - https://spack.io/. You might also want to consider containerisation options, https://apptainer.org/ is a good option.

We have plenty of licensed RHEL, but in isolated environments the hurdle of connecting to a Satellite server or their subscription hub on the internet is too high -- at least with Rocky and the ilk available. For this set up, the licensing model doesn't match reality, at least not easily.

Are we really going to build out compatible configuration management, monitoring, logging, etc? -- it's not a seamless transition. How much time do we have to put towards this?

And yes -- there is software compatibility issues. Look at the OpenHPC software distribution, it's designed for SUSE or Enterprise Linux: https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/2.X

I recommend you just stick with HPC centric tools are workflows. Your scientists aren’t going to learn k8s as you said. SLURM is the scheduler you want and if you’re new to HPC, I recommend taking a look at https://openhpc.community

the general consensus is that pam_slurm_adopt is the better module (that's just one dude's opinion but his citations are good) - the advantage is that not only will it gatekeep SSH access, it'll also drop their SSH session into the cgroups that are constraining the user's resource limits, which also means their CPU usage will show up in sacct for the job (if the user has multiple jobs running on a node their ssh session may get dropped into the wrong one, no help for that)

Check this: https://openhpc.community/ (this helped me a lot when I started. I'm no longer the admin of such systems)

Overall, if you're already in a RedHat-based environment, an installation of OpenHPC is pretty straightforward. Their reference implementation assumes you have a head node for the scheduler that all other nodes NAT through, but that's not a 100% requirement as much as a common setup. It also assumes you can reformat the compute nodes and dedicate them to HPC work, so if you need to keep the systems available as normal workstations, you'll need to deviate a bit. You could also use the OpenHPC instructions as a guide for what packages to install, but it may take longer to get everything right.

https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/1.3.X Newer versions of OpenHPC don't seem to releasing XCat guides anymore unfortunately.