[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 at 9:12pm, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote

> On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 04:35:27PM -0400, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

>>> I think you underestimate the amount of driver back-porting RH puts into
>>> point releases.  When I first got my dual woodcrest compute nodes, the
>>> current CentOS point release (4.4) worked almost perfectly on them (a
>>> network driver upgrade removed the "almost" from that statement).  Are the
>>> app libraries out of date compared to Fedora?  Sure.  Are you more likely
>>> to have success at this with "server" hardware than more desktop oriented
>>> hardware? Sure.  But the point is that RH does roll a lot of new hardware
>>> support into their enterprise distro as it ages.
>>
>
> That's the point - and the problem. Red Hat doesn't release stable
> releases - it releases enterprise class releases and then changes
> stuff, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically between point releases.
>
> Don't even _think_ about a seamless upgrade from Red Hat EL3 to Red Hat
> EL4. [I found, when I made a dual boot test system, that I couldn't
> install RH4 first then RH3 - the ext3 file system had changed so
> significantly that it wouldn't work - possibly something to do with SE
> Linux attributes.] RH EL4 to RH EL5 ?????

Erm, I wasn't referring to EL3 or EL4 as point releases.  Those are major 
versions.  I meant RHEL3u1, RHEL3u2, etc (or CentOS 3.1, CentOS 3.2). 
There you *do* have seamless upgrades while still getting new and improved 
hardware support.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University