[Beowulf] centos5 as cluster os

[Mark Hahn]

> whats everyones take on centos as a cluster os.

works fine for me, but I also don't think distros are very important.
the critical things are:

 	- must have a decent package system.  yum is; I'm not familiar enough
 	with urpmi or apt to know them.  I think both provide appropriate
 	management of dependencies.

 	- basic organization has to be familiar, at least to your admins.
 	I'm comfortable with the sysvinit approach, and would rather not
 	figure out what ubuntu has done to init.  I suspect that an ubuntu
 	person can use it to pare down unused services as well.

this, of course, assumes that you will want to pare down and keep updated.
that's not necessarily the only way to run a cluster, though lack of updates
would be disasterous if you have any way for users to run random stuff.
(eg at least 2 local root exploits for linux since oct.)