[Beowulf] Please help to setup Beowulf

[John Hearns]

2009/2/20 Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com>:
> Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> This said, we tend to suggest our customers look for OpenMPI compatibility
> first.  HP MPI works pretty well also, though it (and other binary only
> stacks) tend to be hard linked against (older) particular Infiniband stacks
> ... makes support ... well ...  challenging.

Joe, I get your point here. I think it would be better put as:
binary-only stacks such as HP-MPI are high quality, however you have
to wait till the vendor links against the latest release of Infiniband
drivers and libraries. This does make support challenging, and leads
to you having to support and maintain several releaes of Infiniband
software, including some which have known bugs or problems.


My tuppence worth is that in a production system, when someone has a
process working reliably they are reluctant to change anything unless
there is a clear bug, or a clear performance gain. As you say, this
leads to older versions being propped up (ahem - maintained).