Using nix-portable for nix on HPCs?

[jackerschott]

I want to use nix-portable on an HPC with a distributed filesystem, where I want to build nix-expression, i.e. write to the nix store, on the login node and later execute binaries from the nix store on the compute nodes. Doing this directly is basically impossible due to filesystem latency (writing a bunch of small files to the nix store is exactly what a distributed filesystem doesn't like), so the best idea I currently have is to keep the .nix-portable directory as a squashfs file on the distributed filesystem and unpack it to some local storage whenever I need to read/write to it. There might be a better solution here that I am not aware of? Otherwise this sounds like something that might be worthwhile to add to nix portable.