SuSE 10.3 workstation image

It is time to produce a spec for the next generation of the workstation image. This is to be based on SuSE 10.3 as 11.0 is too new for compiler support. We also considered Ubuntu, but the autoinstall tools for it are not yet good enough.

Supported packages

Compilers

• Intel 10.0 and up
• Portland
• NAG
• Pathscale

Desktops

• GNOME

Maths libraries

• Intel MKL 10.0 and up
• ACML 4.0
• FFTW3 (untuned, part of SuSE)

MPI libraries

• OpenMPI

Installed but not supported

• Dalton (We're prepared to install the binary we have currently got, which we built on Debian several years ago and which has a 2Gb file size limit. If people want a modern binary then this is serious work- I have already spent some time on this and totally failed to come up with a version that passes the test suite)

Databases

• Cambridge Structural Database

Desktops

• KDE
• fvwm

Maths libraries

• ATLAS (I am prepared to install the precompiled ATLAS package but cannot tune it for every machine as there is too much variety)

Packages proposed for dropping

Python

• Biopython (on the grounds that only one person ever asked for it and they have left)