[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf Digest, Vol 62, Issue 27

[James Cuff]

Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2009 22:10:18 +0100
From: Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Rackable / SGI
To: "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater at galactic.demon.co.uk>
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org

On 5 Apr 2009, at 6:32 pm, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

> Tim Cutts and the Sanger Inst. aren't enough to convince senior
> management that Debian is workable, even though HP and IBM will both support it.

>> Hehe.  I'd be very worried if my reputation *were* considered big
>> enough to swing that sort of decision.  :-)


[sorry in digest mode here with some cut and paste action, I have very
small chunks of time to reply to beowulf these days]


However, not for nothing, that reputation sure as hell is big enough IMHO :)

(as a pre p.s. :  Hi Tim!!)


So anyway, just recently at the advice from some of our Sr. sysadmins,
we started out over here in the other Cambridge with this thing called
puppet, in our HPC environment...

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/

It has a few issues at 6600+ cpu, they still have some "puppet master"
issues. However, nothing that can't be overcome.  All I know is that
it seems to "just work" (tm) for a pretty large multi site cross
campus and beyond cluster installation.  We do do what I like to call
"puppet lite", just bits of the OS and config (lsf/ssh/nagios etc)
rather than the whole shebang...

The OS is still a traditional DHCP/PXE bootstrap.

As always YMMV... and more often than not, it certainly will!

Best,

j.

--
Dr. James Cuff, Director of Research Computing & Chief Technology Architect
Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Information Technology
Room 135, The Science Center, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge.  MA. 02138