[Beowulf] Differenz between a Grid and a Cluster???

[Leif Nixon]

Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> writes:

> Some of the gridware packages do exactly this -- you don't distribute
> binaries, you distribute tarball (or other) packages and a set of rules
> to build and THEN run your application.  I don't think that any of these
> use rpms, although they should -- a well designed src rpm is a nearly
> ideal package for this.  Similarly it would be quite trivial to set up a
> private yum repository to maintain binary rpm's built for at least the
> major hardware architectures and simply start a job with a suitable yum
> install and end it with a suitable yum erase.

But then you need either to:

- Give users root access to install their rpms system-wide. Ouch.

- Let users maintain private rpm databases (in their home directories,
  for example). But then you lose the ability to track dependencies on
  the system-wide rpm database - rpm can only handle one database at a
  time.

- Use some virtualization stuff to give users their own virtual
  machine.

-- 
Leif Nixon                       -            Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre    -      Linkoping University
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