[Beowulf] A press release

[Prentice Bisbal]

Tim Cutts wrote:
> 
> On 3 Jul 2008, at 2:38 pm, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> 
>> Here's another reason to use tarballs: I have /usr/local shared to all
>> my systems with with NFS.
> 
> Heh.  Your view of local is different from mine.  On my systems
> /usr/local is local to the individual system.  We do have NFS mounted
> software of the kind you describe, but we stopped putting it in
> /usr/local because users got confused thinking it was really local to
> the machine.  We now have a separate automounted /software directory for
> all that stuff.

See my other post. The FHS says it's okay for both /opt and /usr/local
to be shared over NFS, but I wouldn't do both. For me /usr/local = NFS
share, /opt = local to machine.

Why do users need to know what's local and what isn't? All that matters
is they need to know the path to a file. (It's logical location, and not
it's physical location).  That's the beauty of the Unix filesystem
hierarchy: everything is arranged logically, not physically. No drive
letters, etc.

In a properly configured environment, things should just work for the users.

I'm speaking in general terms, for HPC where disk or network I/O can be
significant factors physical location is important. But that's usually
for *data*, not the binary running, which is usually read once, and
stays in memory for the remainder of it's execution.

--
Prentice