[Beowulf] OS for 64 bit AMD

[Jamie Rollins]

Any decent distro should support kernel 2.6 with amd64.  But can some one
give me one good reason why you would use anything other than a
streamlined distro like Debian?  Why pay for all the blote in something
like redhat when your nodes are probably going to be running a single
process anyway?

jamie.



On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Joe Landman wrote:

> Actually Redhat now has HPC pricing per node.  There are other good
> reasons to look elsewhere for HPC distributions though, specifically due
> to their lack of good high performance/scalable per-node file system.
> SuSE at least makes XFS and JFS available, and you can build/install a
> system with these.  Redhat prefers that you use ext3.  Another issue for
> the RHEL3 were the ancient kernels with many backports of advanced
> functionality from modern kernels.  Additionally adding modules for new
> hardware support into their boot process is a minor nightmare...
>
>
>
>
> Chris Dagdigian wrote:
> >
> > I second Joe's comments.
> >
> > All of our Opteron systems run Suse 9.2 by default and we use Centos-4
> > for "Redhat" compatible functionality when required since Redhat has
> > explicitly chosen to price themselves out of the cluster market for
> > everything except 2-way 32bit boxes.
> >
> > Suse 9.1/9.2 on Opteron and Suse Enterprise Linux (SLES 8/9) on Itanium
> > Systems (meaning our SGI Altix) have been extremely stable and useful in
> > our work. Highly recommended.
> >
> > -Chris
> >
> >
> >
> > Joe Landman wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Mike:
> >>
> >>   Opterons will do better with a 2.6 kernel (2.6.9 and higher).  If
> >> you are going to use RHEL, you might want to look at Rocks (RHEL3
> >> based) or Warewulf which should be able to sit atop RHEL4.  If you
> >> want to use a Redhat work-alike, you might want to look closely at
> >> Centos4.
> >>
> >>   I am sure others will take issue with this, but I would strongly
> >> advise against using a rolling beta OS (FC-x) as the basis for a
> >> production cycle machine.  If it is a purely experimental cluster, go
> >> for it.  If it is supposed to provide cycles to a wide group, you
> >> might look more closely at a supported/supportable distribution.
> >>
> >>   We have had good luck with SuSE 9.x (x>=1), RHEL3, CentosX on
> >> clusters using a variety of meta-distributions (warewulf, Rocks,
> >> others).  Most of our customers seem to prefer the RHEL series, so we
> >> tend to work with that more than others, but YMMV.
> >>
> >> joe
> >>
> >> Mike Davis wrote:
> >>
> >>> What OSes are Opteron clusters out there running. Is anyone running
> >>> FC2 on opterons?
> >>>
> >>> I'm looking at opterons for our next cluster, but I'm not sure about
> >>> what OS to run. Thus far we've been with RH and or RHAS. But, the
> >>> next cluster will be big and I'm just not sure what we should run.
> >>>
> >>> Mike Davis
> >>> _______________________________________________
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> >>
> >>
> >
>
> --
> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
> Founder and CEO
> Scalable Informatics LLC,
> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
> web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
> phone: +1 734 786 8423
> fax  : +1 734 786 8452
> cell : +1 734 612 4615
>
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