On 01/16/2013 03:04 PM, Riccardo Murri wrote:
Hi all,
thanks for the very interesting discussion. It's getting a bit
"philosophical" so we probably have to agree that we disagree, but
couldn't resist adding one more remark:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Kenneth Hoste <[email protected]> wrote:
What about libraries? ATLAS? OpenMPI? I doubt they also stay away from
updating those, which is just a potentially harmful as updating compilers.
The idea is to keep the stack of things you depend upon fixed, whatever
happens. That's very important in the HPC world to (try and) ensure
reproducibility of results of scientific experiments.
True. However, if you take that to the extreme, you would have to
include also the libc (malloc), kernel, firmware and all the hardware
into your toolchain. In fact, I've had issue of results that changed
because of a BIOS upgrade...
(Indeed use of VMs goes exactly in this direction, but it's another discussion.)
Yes, you're right, but we're doing what we can. Including libc probably
isn't that crazy, but the others are of course still an issue.
We're doing what we can though. ;-)
So, no we've agreed that we disagree, are you satisfied with what
EasyBuild currently provides, or do you feel we should really add
support for using what the system provides? It's not impossible, and
probably even not that hard, but since we won't be working that way I
doubt we'll spend much time on it.
We can help you to get it to work if you feel you really need to though
by answering questions and making suggestions etc., even though we
dislike the approach.
regards,
Kenneth
