[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 06/25/2014 06:07 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
> On 06/25/2014 05:51 PM, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
>> You guys mention perl and I learned an interesting hackish way to get 
>> the
>> latest version of perl on ones system.
>>
>> Have you perl guys used perlbrews before. I set up a perlbrew setup 
>> for a
>
> Yes, but ran into problems on CentOS 6.x.  Easier time of it elsewhere.
>
>> centos vm template at the Data center I used to work at. I had tried to
>> upgrade the system perl and that broke the entire installation, but
>> eventually i found out you could setup the latest version of perl though
>> the perlbrews with out touching the systems perl. All you need to do on
>> reboot is have it source the appropriate file so the perlbrew is loaded.
>
> Basically yes.  Perlbrew is one of the better build environments, but 
> not the only one.  We have our build environment construct Perl 
> 5.18.2, Python 3.4, Julia, and several other tools.  We place our tree 
> into /opt/scalable.
>
> When we build other packages (openmpi etc.) we place it into
>
>     /opt/$package/$version
>
> Modules gives you some capability to manage things like this, though 
> I've (in the dim and distant past) spent many a day debugging things 
> that modules didn't do right.  Usually errant libraries.  ld.so can 
> turn good systems into horrible messes by doing what it was designed 
> to do and loading the first available shared object that matches the 
> "path".
>
>
  As good as modules is, I've heard there can be some problems with it. 
I've never had the chance to really get into it myself yet. (I've used 
other, cruder methods that worked adequately in my environments). lmod 
was created to fix some of these problems. I haven't looked into lmod 
either, but here's an e-mail announcing the project  from 2008, 
explaining why it was started:

http://sourceforge.net/p/modules/mailman/message/20574873/

And an HPC Admin article about lmod by Jeff Layton:
http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Lmod-Alternative-Environment-Modules

--
Prentice