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Re: cern software

On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Christian Holm Christensen wrote:


Hi Brett, et al,

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 13:59 -0400, Brett Viren wrote:

Hi Matt,

Matt Zagrabelny <mzagrabe@d.umn.edu> writes:


My name is Matt Zagrabelny, I work as a Debian sysadmin for the
University of Minnesota Duluth. We are looking at setting up a Beowulf
Cluster for our Physics Department. They are advocating Scientific Linux
(RedHat derivative), I am advocating Debian.


Good for you.

Forgive me for ranting a bit here:

Scientific Linux comes it to variants - the FermiLab variant and the
CERN variant.  I'm only familiar with the CERN one.  Do to various
(external) hardware requirements, we have had to set up a few CERN SL (3
and 4) boxes, and let me tell you that the experience wasn't all that
nice.

First of all, the CSL is customised too much for CERN needs - that is,
there are general assumptions about having home directories on AFS
(though local users _are_ possible), and things like printing services
are geared to CERN's particular setup.

Also, you'd expect a distribution that has `scientific' in the name to
distribute `standard' scientific software, like GNU Scientific Library,
scilab, mathomatic, Maxima, GNUPlot, and so on - well, CSL doesn't (at
least not version 3 - version 4 has a bit more, but still pretty far
from Debian standards).  And then I haven't even mentioned things like
PySci, ROOT, PAW, CERNLIB, GEANT (3.21 and/or 4).

One good thing about CSL is that they use APT or YUM :)

End of rant.
I'll add "horribly ancient kernel" and "seucirty upgrades that break functionality (if you get them at all)" to that too. I'm in the unfortunate seat of having to maintain a couple of SL installations for the EGEE grid, and it is a horrible pain.
Especially coming from a debian point of view when service installation is a matter of apt-get install, answering a few debconf question and the service is running. Here you seem to get a default config file that probably works in Cern, then you have to manually fix that, then manually fix the enabling and automatic startup of the service. 


CMT is an unfortunate mix of a build system and a package manager - very
much geared to SL.  It may work on other GNU/Linux systems, but probably
won't work anywhere else :(
Well, to be fair, it works on _both_ redhat 7.3 and SL3. (Yes, I've heard these two rh flavours being quited as a sign of portability in software.) 


that builds Gaudi and other LHC
packages and provides environment variable setup.


Erhm, `LHC packages' is too loose.  Not all experiments uses CMT, and
some don't use it for everything.  For example, ALICE, my experiment, do
not use it.  We have ROOT as our foundation, and therefor need only very
particular code - the abstraction layerr comes for free via ROOT.
ATLAS can be built and used on Debian, it is just a bit tricky to get all the dependancies and environments right. Especially the nordugrid grid has experience in running ATLAS computations on a wide selection of linux distributions. 


-- OpenPBS anyone?


OpenPBS http://www.openpbs.org/ seems to require registration etc. for
downloading.  This could indicate that the license is not that good for
Debian.
A fairly free (might even be DFSG-free, but some clauses are tricky to interpret) fork: 

http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/torque-resource-manager.php
This is where all the interesting "openpbs"-development happens today, I think. 


-- LLNL's slurm and munge looked interesting and simple.


Slurm does indeed look interesting. No experience with it here though.

/Mattias Wadenstein
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