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

[Steve Herborn]

http://www.top500.org/stats/list/32/os should give you some idea of what the
big`ins are using.  Well at least outside the 77% that simply say they are
using "Linux".  Seems that about 5% were using CNK/SLES 9 as of the last
list.

Steven A. Herborn
U.S. Naval Academy
Advanced Research Computing
410-293-6480 (Desk)
757-418-0505 (Cell)


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On
Behalf Of Rahul Nabar
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 1:32 PM
To: Jan Heichler
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org; Chris Samuel
Subject: Re: Re[2]: [Beowulf] Repeated Dell SC1435 crash / hang. How to get
the vendor to resolve the issue when 20% of the servers fail in firstyear?

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
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