[Users] best practices for groups

[ian.hinder at aei.mpg.de]

> On 12 Feb 2018, at 19:55, Eric West <ewest at d.umn.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Do research groups distribute Cactus/EinsteinToolkit files amongst 
> different users on the same machine? I understand that the Cactus 
> philosophy is that it is meant to be distributed. But it seems redundant 
> for every member of a group, using the same machine, to have their own 
> copies of everything. I am curious how other groups handle this. What 
> parts of the toolkit are shared amongst multiple users, if any? What 
> parts are not shared?
> 
> For context, our group is very small (currently myself and a couple of 
> grad students). The disk quota for the group on our HPC machine is 
> 150GB. Right now that is not prohibitively small. I'm more concerned 
> about sprawling config files, parfiles, etc. Although if there are 
> things that can be done to reduce the overall disk usage, that would be 
> an added bonus. So I am wondering what practices other groups employ.

Hi,

I think that usually, people have their own copies of the source code and build it themselves.  This is because, historically, there were unlikely to be users who were not also developers.  So everyone would be working on their own local changes, and you would not want to conflict with other people.  Nowadays, there may be people who run the code without modifying it, and you could imagine a situation where they simply shared a single executable (no need for source code, since it won't be changed).  A few GB for source code and build files is not that much, these days, though.  Config files and parameter files should be kept in a version controlled repository.  Having separate copies for individual users then translates into having multiple checkouts of those repositories, which allows users to make changes which don't conflict with other people, but then also to share those changes in a controlled way.

-- 
Ian Hinder
http://members.aei.mpg.de/ianhin

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