[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Eric Thibodeau]

Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Chris Samuel wrote:
>
>> 1) Use a mainline kernel, we've found benefit of that
>> over stock CentOS kernels.
>
> Care to comment on this statement ?
I do ;) Simply download a kernel from kernel.org and build the kernel 
yourself and set:

CONFIG_HZ_100=y
CONFIG_HZ=100
CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y

And select the main stuff (HDD drivers) as built in and don't fsck 
around with the initrd stuff, that's only usefull for kernels that need 
to be generic and adapt to all hardware (ie: install CDs)...other than 
that, monolithic a kernel works fine ;)

<rant>
...and such. I'd tell you to use the Gentoo Clustering LiveCD but that's 
work in progress...you could still build the cluster using Gentoo...if 
you're performance savvy...and want things like OpenMP capable compiler 
(gcc-4.3.1, or ICC ;) ) _integrated_ into your system (not a hackish 
afterthought of an RPM that pulls in a new glibc that breaks the install 
anyways ;) ...but, then again...no distribution war, seems people want 
the easy install solution and veil that fact with "it has to be 
supported" catch phrase</rant>


Eh!

Eric Thibodeau