Re: Binaries for SLES10

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Andreas Kuntzagk
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> At my previous just I had to use SUSE as well, and getting Octave up and
>> running was not a particular joyful experience. SUSE is just not very
>> good at packaging basic scientific libraries, so you'll have to compile
>> a lot of stuff yourself from scratch.
>
> Yeah, but for this I need to find out what libraries are missing and
> where to get them.
>
>> You can get some (semi-old) Octave RPM's for SUSE by searching at
>>
>>   http://software.opensuse.org/search
>
> Ok, didn't know this page before. There seems to be some 3.0.3 binaries
> there. I'll try and come back with results.
>
>> but (at least the last time I used them) they did not come with full
>> functionality (no QHull and no suite-sparse as far as I remember).
>
> Actually I don't know what functionality is required here. Have to
> investigate.
>
>> I'm sorry that the answer isn't more satisfactory, but in my experience
>> SUSE just isn't very good for scientific work :-(
>
> Unfortunately changing distro is not an option right now. This is a big
> compute cluster (in production) and I can't start from scratch again.
> For the next time what distro do you propose for scientific computing?
>
> regards, Andreas

We have a cluster running SUSE too, and I think I had to compile all
libs from scratch as well, except BLAS and LAPACK. OTOH, the work
needs only to be done once, and I'm routinely rebuilding Octave (to be
used by all other users) from sources every 2-4 weeks...

For a modest reward I'd be willing to do the same on your cluster :D

But seriously, compiling Octave is surely much more work, but the
result is worth it. You can use heavy compiler optimizations (we use
Intel C++ with -O3), you can link in vendor-tuned BLAS if you have it
(we use AMD's multi-threaded ACML) and most importantly, you get the
most recent sources with the latest features. Also, when a bug is
fixed, you just download and apply the patch (using mercurial that's
trivial) and rebuild, no need to wait for next release...

hth

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz