[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Mark Hahn]

> 64-node RH-9 based Beowulf cluster. I had a difficult time trying to 
> upgrade our cluster from RH-8.0 to FC-2 because the Adaptec Ultra160 
> drivers in FC-2 were broken, so I went to RH-9 instead.

this actually gets back to one of the points that got lost: 
it's quite trivial to substitute a kernel that works into
some random distribution.  yes, there are sometimes dependencies
(eg FC uses initrd, udev and some other fairly newfangled kernel features).

but applications mostly don't know or care about the kernel:
they're more likley interested in glibc.  the problem here is that 
apps are saying "qualified on RH 3.14159", rather than "needs 
glibc 2.2+".  it's all about apps comforming to standards,
avoiding undefined behavior such as the kernel stack size.

AND specifying their requirements up front, rather than saying 
something annoying and misleading like
	  may fail in unpredictable ways on anything except RH 3.14159

vendors usually euphemize that as "supported config: RH 3.14159".