Re: [Beowulf] Selection of Beowulf cluster type
Greetings from the Computational Materials Engine Room (formerly the Morphology
Simulations Lab, and something else before that), home of the Morphology Engine,
the Longevity Engine, the Sterling Engine (pun intended) and a couple of other
clusters with less cool sounding names.
We, too, are a Debian shop. And primarily a diskless-debian shop. SystemImager
installs easier on Debian for sure. I tried their perl script on a couple of
RPM-based machines and gave up after fixing dependencies for awhile. And to
second Camm's opinion, apt is so popular that it is showing up in a lot of
distros (notably Fedora) and has spawned a bunch of apt enhancements like
apt-proxy and apt-build.
Off-topic: If anyone finds themselves in NYC today and tomorrow there is a
Cluster Track at LinuxWorldExpo. Discussions on subjects such as Lustre
(http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/linuxworldny/V40/conference/session.cvn?eID=345)
may be of some interest.
Quoting Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>:
> Greetings! Just a brief plug for Debian here -- we've been using it
> on our commercial cluster for many years and across several hardware
> upgrades, and, after the initial installation, never futzing with the
> software by hand other than 'apt-get install' and/or 'apt-get
> dist-upgrade'! We're literally running the 'same installation'
> automatically upgraded via apt through at least 3 or 4 Debian release
> generations. And the quantity of parallel software available 'out of
> the box' is enormous! I'll never forget the day I could just 'apt-get
> install scalapack-lam-dev' and diagonalize huge matrices across the
> cluster with hardly a hitch. As for the initial installation, some
> people like FAI, though I have never tried it myself, as I've only had
> to install once, and that was somewhere around 1995 ....
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