Re: Guix on clusters and in HPC

[Ben Woodcroft]

Hi,

I'm a little late here, but please do all of the things on that list :)


With this suggestion:

    + for 
[[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-10/msg00005.html][CPU-specific
 optimizations]]
    + somehow support -mtune=native (and even profile-guided
      optimizations?)

I'm not sure if you already thought of this, but an important use case is that 
of pipelines, where we may want to optimise not just the package being built, 
but instead one (or more) of its dependencies. So your suggestion of this 
syntax:

  guix package --tune=haswell -i diamond

requires some extensions, maybe something like this, where bamm can be used as 
a pipeline that uses bwa and samtools:

  guix package -i bamm --tune=haswell bwa samtools

and to optimise the C in bamm itself too:

  guix package -i bamm --tune=haswell bwa samtools bamm


On 01/11/16 17:15, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> myglc2 <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On 10/26/2016 at 14:08 Ricardo Wurmus writes:
> >
> > > At the MDC we’re using SGE and users specify their software environment
> > > in the job script.  The software environment is a Guix profile, so the
> > > job script usually contains a line to source the profile’s
> > > “etc/profile”, which has the effect of setting up the required
> > > environment variables.
> > Cool. How do you deal with the tendency of user's profiles to be "moving
> > targets?" IOW, I am wondering how one would reproduce a result at a
> > later date when one's profile has "changed"?
> I strongly encourage users to do two things:
>
> - use manifests
> - record the current version of Guix and our local package repository
>    when instantiating a manifest.  It only takes these two pieces of
>    information to reproduce a software environment
Is it possible to help automate this process somehow e.g. by checking if 
packages in GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH are within git repositories and reporting 
their statuses? Or is that too much tie-in with git? Tie-in with git 
would also be useful because 'guix lint' could be used to check 
correctness of git commit messages, etc.

ben