[Beowulf] hpl size problems

[Joe Landman]

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> Greg M. Kurtzer writes:
> (regarding what Mark Hahn writes:-)
> 

[...]

>>> > It reminds me of chapter 1 of sysadmin 101: Only install what you 
>>> *need*
>>>
>>> sure, but that's not inherent to your system, and unless you had some 
>>> pretty
>>> godaweful stuff installed before, it's hard to see that explanation...
> 
> Yes.

This is actually why Warewulf is quite nice.  For those situations where 
I cannot use it, I have rolled a very lightweight version of SuSE (and 
will do the same with Centos).

The problem is dependency-hell.  Not the yum-solving variety, just the 
requirements that some packages seem to have where they have 10+ 
pre-requisites, which themselves have 10+ prerequisites....  pretty soon 
you are finding yourself installing doxygen and tex in order to get 
something with a man page section ...

The main distro vendors don't do a very good job of keeping a low 
dependency radius.  You wind up with fairly huge minimum trees pretty 
quickly.

<slight aside>

As for TeX, if you are installing it to your compute nodes, then I hope 
that one of your main tasks will be to crunch lots of documentation.  I 
know those post script placements can be somewhat challenging.  It sure 
as heck doesn't make sense to install it (and openoffice components for 
that matter) to cluster nodes.  I see this all the time, and one of the 
more popular cluster "distributions" does this.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while.  I like the 
install-minimum and add-needed-bits philosophy more than I like the 
everything-including-the-kitchen-sink.  Lots of services seem to get 
activated when you install the-kitchen-sink.



-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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