What happens when you have access to large clusters, but have little control over the software installed on the machines? Unfortunately, this is the current scenario that researchers often find in HPC clusters, which include very old software stack, a brittle environment and non-cooperative sysadmins. We have been experimenting with Nix to provide an up-to-date system running on top of the already existing software, without root permissions with the help of user namespaces.
In this talk we give a tour on the problems we found and how we solved them:
/nix
store./usr/lib
with an isolated root mountSpeakers: Rodrigo Arias Mallo Raúl Peñacoba Veigas