Diskful vs. diskless nodes & libg2c segfault

[Andrej Prsa <andrej.prsa@guest.arnes.si>]

Hi everyone,

This is my first post, so let me briefly introduce myself: my name is
Andrej Prsa and I'm a postdoc at the Astrophysics Dept of Villanova
University. About a week ago our spiffy new 24-core 6-node cluster with
2212 amd64 processors saw its first light of the office. It came with
FC6 preinstalled, but since I'm a long time Debian fan, I switched the
master node to etch immediately and will do so for the other nodes
soon. This is the first of the two questions I have for you experts:

What is the current "official" recommendation for the setup? I am
inclining to diskless node installations and I am curious to know how
difficult that would be. I have been browsing the web for the last
week, but the beowulf debian page seems to be a bit outdated.

The second question I have is about a libg2c segmentation fault. I
wrote a simple program that works on 32bit platforms, but segfaults on
amd64. I filed a bug report here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg388471.html

I would just like to ask whether anyone else on this list experienced
anything similar?

Thank you for your time,
Andrej