7 Installing Guix on a Cluster

Guix is appealing to scientists and HPC (high-performance computing) practitioners: it makes it easy to deploy potentially complex software stacks, and it lets you do so in a reproducible fashion—you can redeploy the exact same software on different machines and at different points in time.

In this chapter we look at how a cluster sysadmin can install Guix for system-wide use, such that it can be used on all the cluster nodes, and discuss the various tradeoffs¹.

Note: Here we assume that the cluster is running a GNU/Linux distro other than Guix System and that we are going to install Guix on top of it.