[Beowulf] Repeated Dell SC1435 crash / hang. How to get the vendor to resolve the issue when 20% of the servers fail in first year?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Jan Heichler <jan.heichler at gmx.net> wrote:
> I See that ScientificLinux has a huge community using it - at least in
> Europe. Some big research institutes are using it (CERN for example) - some
> projects set it as the default distro (D-Grid - a german GRID project).
>
> So i don't see you point here ;-)

Thanks Jan! No point at all! :) I don't mean in any way to belittle
ScientificLinux or any other distros. I have no axe to grind! [I
haven't even used SciLinux much; I did hate ComputeNodeLinux because
it did not allow for dynamic linking (out of the box) which made life
a nightmare with my Python applications! Correct me if I am wrong; CNL
users; I am not disputing that this might have a reason but it was
just a feature I did not need.]

Just making the point that CentOS (IMHO) is as good or bad a choice
and I wish the vendor's let me peacefully live with it! :) To each his
own Distro (within reasonable bounds).

A minor point (very subjective, of course) that makes me prefer one
distro over another is the user-base size.How big is the usage of
ScientificLinux, vs CentOS vs RHEL vs ComputeNodeLinux? I tried to get
figures but I don't have good numbers. {note I left Fedora out since
many users reported that it may not be the most stable one and typical
Fedora users might be of a different profile that what matches a
Beowulf application}

In general it is my naive opinion that the number of users of an
project in the *Open Source Community* is well correlated with its
"bug-freeness" and ease of obtaining help from fellow users. Of
course, I do pay the penalty of not having a customized kernel and the
attendant performance hits (maybe).

Just a personal choice I guess.

-- 
Rahul