[Beowulf] A press release

[Joe Landman]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> Hmmm.... for me, its all about the kernel.  Thats 90+% of the battle. 
>> Some distros use good kernels, some do not.  I won't mention who I 
>> think is in the latter category.
> 
> I was hoping for some discussion of concrete issues.  for instance,
> I have the impression debian uses something other than sysvinit - does 
> that work out well?  is it a problem getting commercial packages 
> (pathscale/pgi/intel compilers, gaussian, etc) to run?

Hi Mark:

   We have multiple Ubuntu servers up, and thus far, no major problems 
... just a few "translational" gotchas.  We have successfully run pgi, 
intel, gaussian, gamess, ... on our Ubuntu units as well as our 
RHEL/Centos, Fedora, ...

> 
> the couple debian people I know tend to have more ideological motives

Yeah ... can't escape this.  I like some of the elements of 
Ubuntu/Debian better than I do RHEL (the network configuration in Debian 
is IMO sane, while in RHEL/Centos/SuSE it is not).  There are some 
aspects that are worse (no /etc/profile.d ... so I add that back in by 
hand ).



> (which I do NOT impugn, except that I am personally more swayed by 
> practical, concrete reasons.)


Building and deploying updated/correct kernels with Ubuntu/Debian is far 
easier (the build is much easier/saner) than with SuSE, RHEL, ...  From 
a pragmatic view, this is what why we have a slight preference for that.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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