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Re: Any input for some talk about usage of Debian in HPC

Le 2024-05-19 19:58, Pierre Gruet a écrit :

Hi Andreas,

Le 19/05/2024 à 13:12, Andreas Tille a écrit :

Hi,

I have an invitation to have some talk with the title

    Debian GNU/Linux for Scientific Research

Abstract:

    Over the past decade, Enterprise Linux has dominated large-scale
research computing infrastructure. However, recent developments have 
    sparked increased interest in community-led alternatives. Debian
    GNU/Linux, a long-standing choice among researchers for supporting
scientific work, is experiencing a renewed interest for High-Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This presentation will provide an overview of how Debian is being utilized to support scientific research and will include a case study showcasing the migration of HTC operations from Enterprise Linux 7 (EL7) to Debian. 

While I could talk about Debian Science and Debian Med in general it
would be cool to reference to some real life examples where Debian is
used in Science and what might be the reason to use Debian.
EDF (French electricity producer and provider, also present in many countries) has several calculation codes that run on supercomputers. These software are developed by the people from the Research and Development to do some simulation, modelling, ... in many fields: uncertainty treatment, simulation of complex systems, incompressible or expandable flow, stochastic control, hydraulics... [0] 
Most supercomputers in use at EDF are currently running Debian.
This is not true anymore. There was a switch around 2020 and our most recent supercomputers run RHEL now. The rationals being it is not possible anymore to buy a Debian based top 500 supercomputer. We were said none of the top sellers would answer to a call for tenders with Debian as a prerequisite.
Also the workstations of people in the R&D department are equipped with a (very close) derivative of Debian. 

True. Not only in R&D but in nuclear engineering departments as well.
Many of these calculation codes are free and can be found in Debian: openturns, stopt, code-saturne, syrthes, salome (formerly), astk (formerly). The first four ones are currently maintained in Debian-science or Debian-math.
At some point, EDF chose to homogenise its scientific computing by basing workstations and supercomputers on Debian [1]: there is a consistent Debian-based environment for scientific informatics. 
Still, [1] is 13 years old, the strategy could evolve in the future.
It has evolved. But we still rely on Debian on the integration side: our scientific software is Debian packaged by ourselves for our workstations, and most of these packages are installed on our RHEL clusters as Debian based singularity containers. 

Best,
_g.



I personally would like to stress the "we package what we use" aspect
and the "we mentor upstream to merge competence of the program with
packaging skills" idea. Any input would be welcome to cover more ideas. 

Kind regards
     Andreas.



Best,

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