sPHENIX discussion of software

[pinkenburg <pinkenburg AT bnl.gov>]

Hi Dave,

Chris Hollowell from rcf installed two newer gcc compilers in afs. They are under

/afs/rhic.bnl.gov/rcassoft/@sys

The problem I would see is that we might cut ourselves off from using grid resources if our environment is too customized. It's not an issue right now but if we want to run our billions of hijing events rcf by itself won't do.

rcf is in the process of testing docker which has supposedly lower overhead compared to traditional virtual environments but given that we have those compilers in rcf this is more intended to decouple our OS upgrades from rcf's upgrade schedule. In terms of OS upgrades, I am trying to get us to SL7 after QM so we could try to switch to gcc 4.8.2 in afs for sPHENIX.

Chris

On 5/22/2015 10:35 AM, David Morrison wrote:

Hi all,

Would it be possible to develop our shiny new sPHENIX code with a compiler a bit shinier and newer than we are currently using on RCF?  The version of GCC there is five years old:

rcas2068% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3)
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

A current-day installation of, say, Ubuntu would come with GCC 4.9.x.  If we also allow ourselves to use some features of C++11/14, we could write simpler code that makes intention clearer.  Things like “nullptr", the “auto” declaration, range-based “for” loops, and lambda expressions can help clear away a lot of syntactic clutter.  Even if you think egghead things like closures and lambda-over-lambda iteration are nuts and should be avoided like the plague, you’ll love the simplicity of the auto declaration.

It’s always been hard to update compilers on a big shared facility like the RCF – is that still true?  Now that we live in the future, do we have virtual machines with whatever environment we want? 

I do realize this is not the most important sPHENIX computing issue out there, but it’ll bother me if I don’t raise it.

Dave

David Morrison Brookhaven National Laboratory phone: 631-344-5840 Physics Department, Bldg 510 C email: dave AT bnl.gov Upton, NY 11973-5000

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Christopher H. Pinkenburg	;    pinkenburg AT bnl.gov
				;    http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~pinkenbu

Brookhaven National Laboratory	;    phone: (631) 344-5692
Physics Department Bldg 510 C	;    fax:   (631) 344-3253
Upton, NY 11973-5000

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