unofficial mirror of guix-science@gnu.org 
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: "Ludovic Courtès" <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr>
To: "Sébastien Lerique" <sl@eauchat.org>
Cc: zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>,  guix-science@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Introducing Guix to HPC at my institution
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2021 10:05:22 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8735wva2p9.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87zgz3c17o.fsf@eauchat.org> ("Sébastien Lerique"'s message of "Tue, 16 Mar 2021 10:54:35 +0900")

Hi Sébastien,

Sébastien Lerique <sl@eauchat.org> skribis:

> Another thought: given Ludo's position, I am imagining that Inria
> Bordeaux runs Guix on some of their infrastructure, is that the 
> case? If so, can you share any details about how that came to happen?

I’ve been working with HPC people at Inria and back then I was working
on Guix in my spare time.  The HPC folks had been using “environment
modules” forever but were looking for a solution that would provide
automation, primarily, and optionally some kind of reproducibility.

They invested into Spack first (actually based on my recommendation; at
the time I wasn’t sure Guix could meet all their requirements) and grew
dissatisfied after a couple of years, in particular because
reproducibility became a more important factor for them.  It’s also
about the time when Ricardo and I published
<https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01161771/en> (Ricardo already had experience
with Guix in HPC and surely has an interesting story to share :-)).

We kept discussing these matters, together with sysadmins of the local
cluster, who were also looking for a solution they could offer users in
addition to modules.  Eventually Guix was installed on that cluster and
local HPC teams got into it at that point.

That’s my story!  :-)

It’s hopefully not the end of the story though.  There are other
clusters listed at <https://hpc.guix.info/about/> that provide Guix.
We’re discussing with others in France, but these things take time…

> Yes I meant that. They run CentOS 8, so convincing them to run a build
> daemon will not be as simple as `apt install guix`, but we'll see how
> the conversation goes :)

Tools like modules, Conda, Spack, and “containers” (Docker, Singularity)
are quite entrenched now in HPC.  All these tools are relatively new so
proposing yet another tool can be a hard sell.

Also, cluster sysadmins tend to be conservative and don’t like the idea
of having a “daemon running as root”.

But my impression is that there’s increasing awareness of the
limitations of these tools.  It used to be that people would disagree
when we said in talks that Docker/Singularity images are not
reproducible; now this is more widely understood.  Likewise for the
deployment issues around Jupyter and workflow languages.

And there’s not a zillion tools out there to address these issues.  :-)

Good luck with your endeavors!

Ludo’.


  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-03-16  9:05 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-03-15  3:12 Introducing Guix to HPC at my institution Sébastien Lerique
2021-03-15 13:47 ` zimoun
2021-03-16  1:54   ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-03-16  8:06     ` zimoun
2021-03-16  9:05     ` Ludovic Courtès [this message]
2021-03-18  2:26       ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-03-26  8:22         ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-03-29 12:03           ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-03-30  1:54             ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-03-30  7:21               ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-03-31  5:23                 ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-04-01  8:35                   ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-04-01 14:34                     ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-04-10 20:43                       ` Ludovic Courtès
2021-04-12  1:21                         ` Sébastien Lerique
2021-04-12 12:43                           ` Ludovic Courtès

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://guix.gnu.org/

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=8735wva2p9.fsf@gnu.org \
    --to=ludovic.courtes@inria.fr \
    --cc=guix-science@gnu.org \
    --cc=sl@eauchat.org \
    --cc=zimon.toutoune@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).