[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Mike Davis]

Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, Mike Davis wrote:
> 
>> one desire is supported stability. My number two desire is speed.  
>> Maybe this philosophy comes from all of my years in unix world (21 and 
>> counting), but the idea of standardizing on something that has the 
>> limited longterm support of FC scares me. We regulalry run nodes for 
>> years without reboot.
> 
> 
> You do, of course, see the oxymoron inherent in this statement.  You
> regularly run nodes for years without a reboot.  Hence after the nodes
> are installed and stabilized (something that will almost certainly take
> place during the period where FC is in fact well supported) support
> becomes irrelevant, because the distro is stable and "just works".

Actually I don't think that its an oxymoron, though I have occasionally 
had my behavior described as moronic. The fact that nodes run for more 
than a year does not necessarily mean that we might not need to update 
them from a supported distro at some point. It happens occasionally.

As an administrator of centrally operated clusters, I particularly don't 
want to have to deal with an issue brought about by  a problem on an OS 
that is past it's support. It just isn't worth it to me technically or 
politically.


Mike