Portage: Bringing Hackers' Wisdom to Science

Abstract

Providing users of HPC systems with a wide variety of up to date software packages is a challenging task. Large software stacks built from source are difficult to manage, requiring powerful package management tools. The Portage package manager from Gentoo is a highly flexible tool that offers a mature solution to this otherwise daunting task. The Gentoo Prefix project develops and maintains a way of installing Gentoo systems in non-standard locations, bringing the virtues of Gentoo to other operating systems. Here we demonstrate how a Gentoo Prefix installation can be used to cross compile software packages for the Intel Xeon Phi known as Knights Corner, as well as to manage large software stacks in HPC environments.