Opinions on packaging ATLAS (for the x86 architecture)

[Bill Nottingham]

Richard W.M. Jones (rjones at redhat.com) said: 
> > This is going to be pretty important for scientific workloads where
> > atlas is going to be used. I've eavesdropped on several conversations
> > where people were talking about being able to run off-the-shelf
> > science code virtual appliance in order to reduce the environment
> > configuration workload for an individual researcher.
> 
> Yup.  The really fun starts when you do live migration.  The processor
> literally changes underneath the running programs.  If you thought you
> had SSE3 one minute, then the next you don't, or vice versa.
> 
> No one has to my knowledge come up with a good way to deal with this.
> But it probably involves signalling the kernel and processes so that
> they can redo processor detection.  You can see why that is not going
> to be pleasant.

Surely the way to do this is to know what your workload is doing,
and not do live migration to random hardware? 

Bill