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’.