Re: panel at ClusterWorld
Patrick McDonnell <pmcdonnell@muncc.marmionacademy.org> writes:
> On Saturday 27 March 2004 11:33 pm, Bdale Garbee wrote:
>> I've agreed to represent Debian on a panel that's being put together by Jon
>> "maddog" Hall at the upcoming ClusterWorld conference and expo in San Jose.
>>
>> During the discussion, I'd like to be able to reference actual clusters
>> that are running Debian. I know about a few, but...
>>
>> This is a request for information about your use of Debian on clusters!
>>
>> I'd like to know what your cluster is used for, why you picked Debian and
>> whether you still think it was a good choice, and any particularly
>> significant results you have achieved or things you have learned that are
>> worthy of report.
We run a P4 2,4 GHz 240 node cluster for bioinformatics. We use debian
because it's the linux distribution that is the most administrator
friendly (not so much gui crap). We basicly use PXE to boot the
machine and the partimage tool to copy images on to the machines.
I don't know if there are some specific details that would make Debian
much better then any other distribution except that you can install a
very clean and small system.
The only real experience we got is that OpenPBS sucked and was
replaced with SGE.
NB. We did all the cables by hand. It looks nice but requires cheep
labour (read: students).. :)
Here are some images:
http://gallery.dna.binf.ku.dk/2003/0103_biocluster_og_lf2003/
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> Bdale
>
> Well, this might not quite be what your looking for... but....
>
> We have a very, very small cluster at my high school being used with POV-ray
> to render some still images and animations the students in our computer club
> are creating. Some of the faculty are using it for a chemistry application
> as well. To my knowledge we are the only high school in the state of
> Illinois to have such a cluster (but I can't guarantee that).
>
> The cluster is running Debian Sarge, chosen primarily because of its package
> management systems that outperform every other free (as in beer) distro. I
> was amazed at how simple Debian was to install and configure on our cluster
> (a great deal simpler than RedHat, which we were trying to use for several
> months.)
>
> Because the cluster is running on older hardware (think PII's and a handful of
> PIII's) any benchmark results probably wouldn't be of interest. We have a
> web page at <http://www.muncc.marmionacademy.org/> if you do happen to find
> this interesting.
--
Mvh|Regards, Lars
System Administrator, Phone: 3532 1349, Room: 318
Bioinformatics Centre, University of Copenhagen,
Universitetsparken 15
DK-2100 Copenhagen
DENMARK
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