AMBER Archive (2006)

Subject: Re: AMBER: combining different versions of AMBER

From: Atro Tossavainen (atro.tossavainen+amber_at_helsinki.fi)
Date: Mon Jul 24 2006 - 00:44:10 CDT

Ross,

> My best advice to you however is that if you have access to Amber 9 you
> should just consider installing this yourself on all the machines you will
> use. Intall it in your own home directory and use this. I recommend that
> anybody running simulations with Amber does this unless they explicitly
> trust the sysadmin of the machine. I.e. if you are using a centrally
> installed program how do you know that the person who installed it ran the
> test suite and verified it worked.

Applying your reasoning to every application on every system (which
is only fair since the user cannot know that _any_ of the centrally
installed programs work properly...) causes interesting situations
when user 1 is complaining that something isn't working and user 2
has no problems and user 3 gets a totally different problem altogether,
all running the "same" program on the same system. (It also wastes
disk space, even if a hundred copies of the AMBER 8 source code only
weigh 3 GB. But extrapolate to a bigger number of users and a
selection of program suites and you will get to a point where it does
make a difference.)

I'd hate to be the sysadmin on your dream system. But to each their own. 

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . helsinki . fi / %7E atossava / > NO FILE ATTACHMENTS
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