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Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

I tried to remove the expectation that supercomputer applications would load their libraries dynamically and that became one of the single most hated aspects of that product line

people really hate having their expectations violated - even if its an expectation of a fork in the eye

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Do tell; which product was this?

cray xt3. my understanding that in later versions Cray shipped compute node linux with some solution for maintaining the .so file on the nodes

Interesting! I'd never touched a Catamount/SUNMOS system; didn't know that static everything was an option there, although some of my friends did work on those. Do you suppose the friction was due to it not being how their local workstation/previous system worked?

yeah, mostly just 'what the hell'. I pretty sure it really didn't get in anyone's way - all the libraries were installed on the front end. it wasn't an option - we didn't support dynamic linking there

I never worked with the XT3, but I’ve worked with others with similar limitations. Many of our projects prefer static linking, but at any given time they tend to have to run on several platforms. As of today, they have to run on at least two where one won’t load gpu components in libraries correctly if they are statically linked, and one where it won’t if they’re dynamically linked. Forcing projects into one model or the other makes the smaller requirements on other platforms much harder to deal with, even if the requirement aligns with the project’s preference.

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