Good points. I should have mentioned I was talking more about "generic mainstream HPC" (like you say "cloud") and not the performance cases where running on bare metal is essential.
-- Doug > On Thursday, 3 May 2018 11:04:38 PM AEST Douglas Eadline wrote: > >> Here is where I see it going >> >> 1. Computer nodes with a base minimal generic Linux OS >> (with PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS in kernel, added in 3.5) > > Depends on your containerisation method, some don't need to rely on that > as > the proactively disarm containers of dangerous abilities (setuid/setgid/ > capabilities) before the user gets near them. > > That said, even RHEL6 has support for that, so you'd be hard pressed to > find an > up-to-date system that doesn't have that ability. > >> 2. A Scheduler (that supports containers) >> >> 3. Containers (Singularity mostly) >> >> All "provisioning" is moved to the container. There will be edge cases >> of >> course, but applications will be pulled down from >> a container repos and "just run" > > This then relies on people building containers that have the right > libraries > for the hardware you are using. For instance I tried to use some > Singularity > containers on our system for MPI work but can't because the base OS is too > old > to include support for our OmniPath interconnect. > > The other issue is that it encourages people to build generic binaries > rather > than optimised binaries to broaden the systems the container can run on > and/or > because they don't have a proprietary compiler (or the distro has a > version of > GCC too old to optimise for the hardware). > > I would argue that there is a place for that sort of work, but that it's > the > cloud not so much HPC (as they're not trying to get the most out of the > hardware). > > I'm conflicted on this because I also have great sympathies for the > reproducibility side of the coin! > > All the best, > Chris > -- > Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > -- > MailScanner: Clean > > -- Doug -- MailScanner: Clean _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf