On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 10:47:49PM +0100, Ewan MacMahon wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> >
> >
> > Glasgow's planning to upgrade to SL4 x86_64 next week, and I
> > wondered what experiences people had of this (the 64 bitness
> > in particular - the SL4ness seems more or less sorted). We're
> > concerned about 32bit versions of perl and python, which
> > don't seem to have compatibility RPMs,
> Would you really need them - a scripting language should work the
> same regardless of how the interpreter was built, which, I think
> is the logic behind not having 32bit versions in the first place?
It is the same up to the point you try to load a module that requires
a C library that is only available in 32bit, the system ones are
obviously available but the LCG ones aren't and since sources/srpms
as you noticed aren't always available we are stuck with 32bit versions
of the interpreters.
Even if we do manage to get 64bit versions of the LCG libraries there
are also experiments that they use python to "drive" their C/C++ code so
they need to be able to find the "right" python version for their code.
With the current solutions we are making it impossible for them to move
to a 64bit version in the future. Hmm maybe I should create a "64bit"
queue where the 32bit interpreters don't get added to the path but I
suspect that this will create problems to some users :( also.
Going back to the original question. At imperial we are running a 64bit
rhel4 cluster for a bit less than a year now with only minor problems.
Cheers,
Kostas
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