[clug] Request for Ideas/Suggestions: Fedora Scientific Spin

[Amit Saha]

On 07/03/2011 10:09 PM, Robin Humble wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 03, 2011 at 09:16:27PM +1000, Brad Hards wrote:
>> On Sunday 03 July 2011 13:31:45 Amit Saha wrote:
>>> It would be of great help if the interested ones among you suggest some
>>> generic tools for numerical computing/scientific research that you find
>>> really useful which is not already included in the list of packages in
>>> the above wiki page.
>> I note gcc in the list, but a C++ compiler might also be useful. Maybe MPI.
>
> openmpi definitely. more science == more cpu power, and cpus aren't
> getting faster so parallel is the only option.
>
> gfortran is necessary for all those 1970's fortran codes that are
> (sadly) still going strong.
>
> (p)netcdf, hdf5, and their python interfaces are widely used across
> disciplines. pnmtools remains awesome, as does xv. some people use
> imagemagick but it's very inefficient.
>
> random others ->
> boost, petsc, ffmpeg, mencoder, ipm, gmp, octave, valgrind, fftw
>
> as you can see I'm not limiting myself to purely gpl codes, but these
> are what always gets installed on science machines, so hey...
>
> I guess you can't include the intel compilers and idl? :)
>
> torque, maui, powerman, conman, pdsh/c3, modules, and maybe slurm for clusters.
> not many clusters run fedora though - it obsoletes too fast. ISV codes and
> cluster folks (eg. me) want stability for a few years so run rhel/centos/sl +
> maybe epel. but as fedora flows on into rhel, I thought I'd mention it.
>
>> several - git, bzr, hg) probably should be there too. Perhaps a GUI for the
>> DVCS.
>
> a lot of folks seem to use cvs/svn still, while the new kids seem to
> prefer github.
>
>> Depending on how you see research, perhaps something for document management
>> (e.g. bibliography, perhaps some kind of tool to stash PDFs of reference
>> papers) might be useful.
>
> bibtex, latex, and I forget what the latex gui is - never used it.

Thanks a lot Andrew! I have included the recommendations in the wiki 
page [1], where I plan to incorporate the discussions and suggestions I 
get before I create my next kickstart file.


Thanks a lot for all the +1s too. Even if in case, it doesn't get 
accepted as an official spin for some reason, I am doing it anyway!

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scientific_Spin#Scope_.2F_Testing

Regards,
Amit

-- 
http://echorand.me