Re: The weakest link in the toolchain
It's HPC it is not like an ordinary server. Firstly they are academics. Secondly you can't run an HPC system without access to compilers. A significant proportion of the users are bringing their own code and need to compile it up. Trying to replicate the environment on their personal machines to produce code that will work on the HPC is really quite tricky and many HPC users have access to multiple HPC sites (which is how it has spread among HPC systems) so way way easier to compile on the machine. Second we prefer our users to use vendor compilers because they can typically squeeze an extra 5-10% out of the machine, and there is never enough compute cycles.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
