[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Tomislav Maric]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> I've seen Centos mentioned a lot in connection to HPC, am I making a
>> mistake with Ubuntu??
> 
> distros differ mainly in their desktop decoration.  for actually 
> getting cluster-type work done, the distro is as close to irrelevant
> as imaginable.  a matter of taste, really.  it's not as if the distros
> provide the critical components - they merely repackage the kernel,
> libraries, middleware, utilities.  wiring yourself to a distro does
> affect when you can or have to upgrade your system, though.
> 
> consider, for instance, that there's no reason for a compute node to 
> run whatever distro you choose for your login node.  yes, you'd like 
> to keep some synchronization in libc and middleware libraries.  but 
> you could configure a compute node with only the basics: kernel, shell,
> minimal /sbin utilities, single rc script, sshd (in addition to the 
> probably few libraries needed by jobs - compiler runtimes, probably MPI,
> probably acml/mkl)
> 

Thanks, that's exactly what I thought: the software components of a
beowulf mentioned in rgb's book and on the net, are simply utilities
that are used upon any linux distribution.