[Clusterusers] glibc version on fly, cluster

[Wm. Josiah Erikson]

Hm. So...

Even CentOS 7.3 (the latest) won't get you up to that version of glibc,
and updating glibc on a system is, well, not really feasible, since
basically everything links against it.

So I think we have four choices:

    1. See if you can build a statically-linked version of blender that
is portable to the cluster. It's not clear to me from the instructions
on static linking whether you can statically link glibc or not

    2. Build a chrooted environment on the cluster to build and run
blender in

    3. Update the Macs and use them only

    4. Use docker or something to deploy minimal blender servers. I
haven't messed with docker yet and don't know how feasible this would be.

    -Josiah



On 5/15/17 2:28 PM, Bassam Kurdali wrote:
> Thanks Josiah! Glad that it's not just me and my rendering ;)
> Crossing fingers and hoping it won't be a big disruptive change (from
> my perspective, if we can get at or beyond glibc 2.19 I'll be happy as
> a clam
> On Fri, 2017-05-12 at 22:26 -0400, Wm. Josiah Erikson wrote:
>> It looks like there are ways to run newer versions of CentOS
>> underneath
>> ROCKS 6.2... will research more and attempt to update next week if
>> it's
>> not too disruptive, later this summer if it is. You're hardly the
>> only
>> person noticing how out-of-date everything is on the cluster. Of
>> course
>> I also worry that we've been pwned for years and just don't know it.
>> I
>> see no evidence of that... but that means not much. It's past time
>> for a
>> major overhaul.
>>
>>     -Josiah
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5/12/17 10:08 PM, Wm. Josiah Erikson wrote:
>>> Well really the issue is that we're still running ROCKS, and we're
>>> a
>>> version behind... but ROCKS seems to have fallen behind and a new
>>> release hasn't come out in almost two years. I think it's time to
>>> move
>>> to something else and probably entirely rebuild the cluster. The
>>> latest
>>> version of ROCKS is based on CentOS 6.6, which is already out of
>>> support
>>> and doesn't have a new glibc either.
>>>
>>> I will do some research, ask my HPC colleagues what they're running
>>> these days, and ask the ROCKS list what's up - I think they were
>>> NFS-funded and, well...
>>>
>>> That said, we should figure out an interim solution. I shall think
>>> about
>>> this more next week.
>>>
>>>     -Josiah
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 5/12/17 9:08 PM, Bassam Kurdali wrote:
>>>> hi folks,
>>>> we're currently at glibc 2.12 which is fairly oldish - there's a
>>>> shiny
>>>> new blender with with pretty impressive rendering improvements
>>>> (new
>>>> shaders and massive speed increases) - but as of the *last*
>>>> blender
>>>> version, they dropped glibc older than 2.19
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This is mainly a question for josiah, but can we do something
>>>> like have
>>>> two glibc versions on the system? or some kind of fancy
>>>> chroot/local
>>>> environment? failing that, I might need some help building for
>>>> fly
>>>> (installing dependencies, cmake, etc.)
>>>>
>>>> cheers,
>>>> Bassam
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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-- 
Wm. Josiah Erikson
Assistant Director of IT, Infrastructure Group
System Administrator, School of CS
Hampshire College
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 559-6091