Comments on: An Apps Store for HPC? http://insidehpc.com/2012/11/23/an-apps-store-for-hpc/ HPC News Without the Noise for Supercomputing Professionals | insideHPC Sun, 19 May 2013 10:46:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 By: Damien http://insidehpc.com/2012/11/23/an-apps-store-for-hpc/#comment-380750 Damien Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:09:04 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=33205#comment-380750 There's the financial and business model side of app stores to consider as well. Organisations typically aren't going to allow their engineers to run several thousand dollars through on the credit card and just expense it. That's still the realm of the corporate sale with a blessing (or the absence of a curse) from IT. I'm not saying it won't work, but it might put a cap on the level of capability you can buy through the app store, because there will be a cap on the price. There’s the financial and business model side of app stores to consider as well. Organisations typically aren’t going to allow their engineers to run several thousand dollars through on the credit card and just expense it. That’s still the realm of the corporate sale with a blessing (or the absence of a curse) from IT. I’m not saying it won’t work, but it might put a cap on the level of capability you can buy through the app store, because there will be a cap on the price.

]]> By: Kenneth Hoste http://insidehpc.com/2012/11/23/an-apps-store-for-hpc/#comment-380571 Kenneth Hoste Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:44:28 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=33205#comment-380571 nanohub.org is very impressive indeed! I'm not quite convinced though that it's as simple as setting up an 'app store'. For HPC, you typically need quite a bit of support to allow scientists to run their stuff, it's just too complex to do it all by themselves. The cloud approach of nanoHUB sure is interesting, but I feel there will always be a need for local/national centers where people can hop by if they're having problems with running their software, getting the best perfornance, scaling up, etc. Anyone who is looking into setting up an 'app store' similar to nanoHUB should be aware of EasyBuild (see http://hpcugent.github.com/easybuild), a community effort to resolve the pain in building and installing scientific software. Building scientific software is often a pain because the nowhere-near-to-standard build procedures. Similarly, commercial software often involves custom build procedures as well, sometimes even interactive installers which are a true nightmare for sysadmins who want to automate software installations and spend their time on the interesting stuff. EasyBuild tries to solve this by offering a framework to implement (scientific) software build procedures once, and share them with the HPC community, which is a *huge* time saver in the end. (disclaimer: I'm a co-developer of EasyBuild) nanohub.org is very impressive indeed!

I’m not quite convinced though that it’s as simple as setting up an ‘app store’.

For HPC, you typically need quite a bit of support to allow scientists to run their stuff, it’s just too complex to do it all by themselves.

The cloud approach of nanoHUB sure is interesting, but I feel there will always be a need for local/national centers where people can hop by if they’re having problems with running their software, getting the best perfornance, scaling up, etc.

Anyone who is looking into setting up an ‘app store’ similar to nanoHUB should be aware of EasyBuild (see http://hpcugent.github.com/easybuild), a community effort to resolve the pain in building and installing scientific software.

Building scientific software is often a pain because the nowhere-near-to-standard build procedures. Similarly, commercial software often involves custom build procedures as well, sometimes even interactive installers which are a true nightmare for sysadmins who want to automate software installations and spend their time on the interesting stuff.

EasyBuild tries to solve this by offering a framework to implement (scientific) software build procedures once, and share them with the HPC community, which is a *huge* time saver in the end.

(disclaimer: I’m a co-developer of EasyBuild)

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