Reminder: you can make fake chroots without root privileges (can also be used to convert Docker images and run software within them): https://github.com/common-workflow-language/common-workflow-language/wiki/Userspace-Container-Review#getting-userspace-containers-working-on-ancient-rhel
If your kernel version is new enough and your security people are fine with Docker then there are various efforts to ease administration of Docker on top of HPC schedulers. On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Steffen Möller <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > If I can remember correctly, one reason we are doing this Debian > packaging is that we find not all but many packages not ultimately > straight-forward to compile. It is not the "configure && make install" > that bothers us, but the manifold dependencies and dependencies of those > dependencies that also need to be maintained. And this effort can be > shared, obviously. > > Now, for a single binary I would not mind, but we are about to > transition all our "evolving routine" workflows over to the University's > central HPC cluster . And the suggestion is to just recompile what one > needs and automate that recompilation if it is any cumbersome - somewhat > surprisingly they did not say "package it". It is some Jessie-analogous > CentOS, i.e. not a .deb distro and they feature the typical module > environments to get functionality in and out, together with slurm. Would > it be worthwhile to try installing the packages to $HOME/debroot as with | > dpkg-deb -x app.deb $HOME/debroot| > and fiddle with the $PATH environment not too different from how module > is doing it? This would certainly raise my interest in backports. > > Our next (first real) meeting is on Thursday. Docker and chroot > environments will certainly be discussed. We could also just not > completely migrate everything but constrain ourselves, e.g., on short > read alignments, and self-compile those "typical suspect" binaries only. > Not ideal. What do you folks do out there? Just not bother and use some > commercial cloud service? There would be single VMware instances for us, > but not tens or hundreds as in OpenStack or Eucalyptus. I presume that > this situation is rather common and I would very much like to hear your > opinions/experiences about it. > > Cheers, > > Steffen > > > -- Michael R. Crusoe Community Engineer & Co-founder Common Workflow Language project https://impactstory.org/u/0000-0002-2961-9670 [email protected] +32 (0) 2 808 25 58 +1 480 627 9108
