Re: Who Uses Scientific Linux, and How/Why?

2020-02-28 Thread ~Stack~
On 2/28/20 5:00 AM, Paddy Doyle wrote:
> We're a university HPC centre.

[snip]

> Plus the stability of the longer RHEL life cycle has been a big
> plus for stable clusters (*).
> 
[snip]
> 
> (*) although more recently some people are asking more and more for the
> latest and greatest.. yes, we're looking at you ML and AI! :)

A combination of Singularity [1] and Spack [2] has kept my ML/AI users
quite happy, though there is a learning curve.

Singularity is pretty easy to grasp, it's just extra steps if the user
wants to build their own but it's been great because once they do they
jump on board the "reproducible science" aspect pretty quick. Greg
Kurtzer and his team are doing a great job with Singularity.

Spack is trivial if what they want is already there, a bit more
challenging if they have to add programs to it. Fortunately they've
offered full day training at Super Computing every year. The tutorial
section hasn't been posted yet for 2020, but here is their 2019 tutorial
and resources are online. [3]

[1] https://sylabs.io/singularity/
[2] https://spack.io/
[3]
https://sc19.supercomputing.org/?post_type=page&p=3479&id=tut164&sess=sess194

Hope this helps. I understand the sysadmin pain in trying to meet the
rapidly evolving ML/AI researcher demands. :-)

~Stack~



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Re: Who Uses Scientific Linux, and How/Why?

2020-02-28 Thread Paddy Doyle
We're a university HPC centre.

We've been using SL since at least SL4 (before that was before my time),
and currently mostly on SL7 with a few SL6 still dotted around on older
clusters.

Certainly in the past there was a requirement to have a RHEL-like OS for
certain core software packages. Probably less so now, but most of our
tooling is still based around SL so there hasn't been a big impetus to
change. Plus the stability of the longer RHEL life cycle has been a big
plus for stable clusters (*).

On non-cluster nodes we have a mixture of some other OS's.

We're very thankful for all of the work the SL team has put in over the
years!

And to everyone on this list who has been so generous with their time.

In terms of the future, we're mainly focussed on CentOS 8 as it should be
most similar to our current deployment tools, and since that's where CERN
etc are going it seems like a good option. No doubt there will be teeting
pains, but life has to be interesting, right. :)

Paddy

(*) although more recently some people are asking more and more for the
latest and greatest.. yes, we're looking at you ML and AI! :)

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 06:09:27AM -0800, Peter Willis wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> The variation in uses of t Scientific Linux is quite interesting.
> As mentioned before, we are using it for fluid dynamics modelling and 
> oceanography, in the context of parallel computing with OpenMP and MPICH.
>  
> I am curious to see what everyone else have been using it for.
>  
> Perhaps, if it’s not too much trouble, people on the list might give a short 
> blurb about how they use it and why.
> Maybe also mention others they know who are using it who are not on this list.
>  
> Peter
>  
>  
>  
> >I'm no scientist, just an electronics guy who do a lot of research in RF (as 
> >hobby, mostly testing antennas for ham radio in VHF bands) from Argentina.
> > 
> >Fot SL the most "well done" linux distribution, for people who simply knows.
> > 
> >Will look forward to move to another distribution.
> > 
> > 
> >>I'm an independent electronics inventor, heavily dependent
> >>on both competent software and competent laboratory science,
> >>both for the knowledge I depend on and the tools I use to
> >>transform that knowledge into products and services for
> >>my customers.  
> >>

-- 
Paddy Doyle
Research IT / Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
Phone: +353-1-896-3725
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.tchpc.tcd.ie_&d=DwIFaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=7eQbAmvcrvtsbWH90yHv8gKKZkdTRKgrn1hq9Br2S8M&s=blSs6NvBcMwBsnqPmuBiKlRs_FQCvvhsilYiQ2-X8ls&e=