Will those binaries actually work? This is a central question for HPC practitioners and one that’s sometimes hard to answer: increasingly complex software stacks being deployed, and often on a variety of clusters. Will that program pick the right libraries? Will it perform well? With each cluster having its own hardware characteristics, portability is often considered unachievable. As a result, HPC practitioners rarely take advantage of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD): building software locally on the cluster is common, and software validation is often a costly manual process that has to be repeated on each cluster.

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Some things in our software world are timeless. The venerable Environment Modules are one of these. If you’ve ever used a high-performance cluster in the last three decades, chances are you’re already familiar with it. Modules is about managing software environments, just like Guix is—or, perhaps more accurately, guix shell.

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Previously we discussed ways to use Guix-produced packages on a cluster where Guix is not installed. In this post we look at how a cluster sysadmin can install Guix for system-wide use, and discuss the various tradeoffs.

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In the previous post, we saw that Guix’s build daemon needs to run as root, and for a good reason: that’s currently the only way to create isolated build environments for packages on GNU/Linux. This requirement means that you cannot use Guix on a cluster where the sysadmins have not already installed it. In this article, we discuss how to take advantage of Guix on clusters that lack a proper Guix installation.

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