# Package Developement Targeted at Older Julia Versions
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308
**Category:** Package Management
**Tags:** package, hpc, development
**Created:** [November 5, 2024, 10:04pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308 "2024-11-05T22:04:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@NonDairyNeutrino](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/NonDairyNeutrino)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2024, 10:04pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/1 "2024-11-05T22:04:11Z")
I’m developing a package (announcement in the coming months!) targeted to run on my university’s supercomputer, but due to ~~funding & priority~~ maintenance limitations, the “operating environment” is out of date; more specifically, it’s a ~2014 POWER8 system running Ubuntu 16.04 on the PowerPC architecture with NVIDIA P100s running CUDA 8. So, as we’ve found so far, the Julia 1.7.0-rc2 binary is the most recent version that seems to work. With that in mind, **what are some good workflow tips for developing packages targeted at older Julia versions**? For example, some dependencies could include CUDA.jl, Adapt.jl, and ClusterManagers.jl.
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### Author:  [@Oscar\_Smith](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Oscar_Smith)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2024, 10:18pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/2 "2024-11-05T22:18:35Z")
Is a 2014 supercomputer actually going to be faster than a decent somewhat modern AMD server? Multi-node overhead seems unlikely to be worth it for 10 year old hardware.
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### Author:  [@NonDairyNeutrino](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/NonDairyNeutrino)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2024, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/3 "2024-11-05T22:30:55Z")
Oh absolutely, though I do believe that, while a single RTX 4090 GPU has better _single_ precision performance than the 12 P100s in this system combined, the P100s have better _double_ precision performance. Really the goal of the project is to make this package so that it’s ready to use on any\* HPC platform. In other words, I’m using this supercomputer as a testing ground to develop something that can be dropped into something like what’s at a national lab. Additionally, this process will allow other folks to run it locallly at their own “maintenance limited” institutions.
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### Author:  [@lmiq](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/lmiq)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2024, 10:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/4 "2024-11-05T22:40:45Z")
I would develop normally with the newest release and add a CI test with Julia 1.7. That’s how we normally keep compatibility with older Julia versions.
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### Author:  [@giordano](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/giordano)
#### Post date: [November 5, 2024, 10:56pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/5 "2024-11-05T22:56:24Z")
Do you have a clue of how long this system will be up for? I only see PowerPC clusters being retired nowadays (like Summit).
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### Author:  [@carstenbauer](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/carstenbauer)
#### Post date: [November 6, 2024, 5:40am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/6 "2024-11-06T05:40:28Z")
If I were you I would try to get access to a more modern cluster. It’s often easier than one might think.
Where are you located? Perhaps we can point you somewhere.
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### Author:  [@NonDairyNeutrino](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/NonDairyNeutrino)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2024, 6:39pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/package-developement-targeted-at-older-julia-versions/122308/7 "2024-11-09T18:39:37Z")
Thank you for your offer, but honestly, I am not _currently_ interested in the actual performance of the machine. As I mentioned above:
> [@NonDairyNeutrino](#):
>
> I’m using this supercomputer as a testing ground to develop something that can be dropped into something like what’s at a national lab. Additionally, this process will allow other folks to run it locallly at their own “maintenance limited” institutions.
Additionally, I wanted to ask the question to collect resources and ideas to develop on hardware that doesn’t support the more recent versions of the underlying software such as LLVM; this could possibly even extend to embedded systems due to their high constraints, but I’m much less familiar with those cases.