Dear ALPS developers,
I have a simple question.
Are ALPS binary packages available for download/automatic update through standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories?
This appears to be the main argument of the clusters' system administrators against requests to install alps libraries and applications. They claim that it is not possible and that it involves extra work for them to update it manually (which they are not paid for). I also cannot seem to find it in packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com. There are only some old binaries for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
The manual installation of ALPS on a cluster without administration privileges is difficult. This needs to be said, although I understand that you are continuously doing steps to make it easier. I think that many end users would appreciate having a standardized way of installing and updating the packages through the repositories.
Please note that all this is written bona fide (from a happy ALPS user) and assuming, of course, that this issue is not already resolved.
Best wishes and thanks in advance, Kruno
------------------------------------------------- Dr. Krunoslav Prsa, Postdoc Dynamics of strongly correlated materials Lab. for Solid State Physics Building/Office: HPF/E15.1 Schafmattstrasse 16, ETH Zürich Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Switzerland. Office phone: +41 44 633 22 96 Lab phone: +41 44 633 23 01 Mobile phone: +41 76 386 17 99 -------------------------------------------------
Dear Kruno,
Munehisa is working on Debian packages and Olivier on Ubuntu. But actually there is nothing in ALPS that needs administrator privileges. What operating system is your cluster running on? It is, for example, very easy to install ALPS on the Brutus cluster at ETH to which you should have access.
Matthias
On 29 Nov 2010, at 14:49, Krunoslav Prsa wrote:
Dear ALPS developers,
I have a simple question.
Are ALPS binary packages available for download/automatic update through standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories?
This appears to be the main argument of the clusters' system administrators against requests to install alps libraries and applications. They claim that it is not possible and that it involves extra work for them to update it manually (which they are not paid for). I also cannot seem to find it in packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com. There are only some old binaries for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
The manual installation of ALPS on a cluster without administration privileges is difficult. This needs to be said, although I understand that you are continuously doing steps to make it easier. I think that many end users would appreciate having a standardized way of installing and updating the packages through the repositories.
Please note that all this is written bona fide (from a happy ALPS user) and assuming, of course, that this issue is not already resolved.
Best wishes and thanks in advance, Kruno
Dr. Krunoslav Prsa, Postdoc Dynamics of strongly correlated materials Lab. for Solid State Physics Building/Office: HPF/E15.1 Schafmattstrasse 16, ETH Zürich Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Switzerland. Office phone: +41 44 633 22 96 Lab phone: +41 44 633 23 01 Mobile phone: +41 76 386 17 99
Dear Matthias, Thanks for your fast answer. I have access to both the Brutus (running CentOS) and the Condor clusters (running Ubuntu/Debian) at ETHZ.
I am aware that it is in principle possible to install the packages without the administrator rights and I managed to do it with the versions 1.2/1.3. Unfortunately, in reality (at least for me) it takes too much time to get the thing working (~few days), and often it needs to be re-done every time one accesses the cluster (as appears to be the case with the Brutus cluster). This is a complete deal-breaker if one uses ALPS just infrequently enough to forget the exact steps one has done the last time. :)
I understand that the object of my request is a work in progress and I am very much looking forward to its completion.
Best wishes and thanks once again, Kruno
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:20:54 +0100, Matthias Troyer troyer@phys.ethz.ch wrote:
Dear Kruno,
Munehisa is working on Debian packages and Olivier on Ubuntu. But actually there is nothing in ALPS that needs administrator privileges. What operating system is your cluster running on? It is, for example, very easy to install ALPS on the Brutus cluster at ETH to which you should have access.
Matthias
On 29 Nov 2010, at 14:49, Krunoslav Prsa wrote:
Dear ALPS developers,
I have a simple question.
Are ALPS binary packages available for download/automatic update through standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories?
This appears to be the main argument of the clusters' system administrators against requests to install alps libraries and applications. They claim that it is not possible and that it involves extra work for them to update it manually (which they are not paid for). I also cannot seem to find it in packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com. There are only some old binaries for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
The manual installation of ALPS on a cluster without administration privileges is difficult. This needs to be said, although I understand that you are continuously doing steps to make it easier. I think that many end users would appreciate having a standardized way of installing and updating the packages through the repositories.
Please note that all this is written bona fide (from a happy ALPS user) and assuming, of course, that this issue is not already resolved.
Best wishes and thanks in advance, Kruno
Dr. Krunoslav Prsa, Postdoc Dynamics of strongly correlated materials Lab. for Solid State Physics Building/Office: HPF/E15.1 Schafmattstrasse 16, ETH Zürich Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Switzerland. Office phone: +41 44 633 22 96 Lab phone: +41 44 633 23 01 Mobile phone: +41 76 386 17 99
Hi, Krunoslav,
I am currently responsible for Debian packages.
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Krunoslav Prsa kprsa@phys.ethz.ch wrote:
Are ALPS binary packages available for download/automatic update through standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories?
Yes, but currently only for Debian sid(unstable)/squeeze(testing). See below for the apt line.
http://alps.comp-phys.org/mediawiki/index.php/Download_and_install_ALPS_2#In...
Right now it hosts only 2.0.0rc3 binary for amd64. For other arch, Debian standard way:
$ apt-get build-dep alps2 $ apt-get source --build alps2
can create packages.
This appears to be the main argument of the clusters' system administrators against requests to install alps libraries and applications. They claim that it is not possible and that it involves extra work for them to update it manually (which they are not paid for). I also cannot seem to find it in packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com. There are only some old binaries for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
Old days (Debian etch; ALPS 1.2), ALPS library/applications were part of Debian official. But I could not help package maintainer those days, and at lenny the package dropped.
Due to the licencing issue, ALPS packages are non-free (for Debian). However, now that the Debian package creation becomes very straightforward, it would be possible to ask Debian to contain ALPS packages again once Debian squeeze is out and ALPS 2.0 is released.
The manual installation of ALPS on a cluster without administration privileges is difficult. This needs to be said, although I understand that you are continuously doing steps to make it easier. I think that many end users would appreciate having a standardized way of installing and updating the packages through the repositories.
For clusters, isn't your $HOME NFS (or cluster FS) shared? I believe that every node in the recent cluster have access to shared $HOME. If this is the case, installing ALPS under $HOME is sufficient.
Best regards,
comp-phys-alps-users@lists.phys.ethz.ch