[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 11:50:10AM -0700, Greg Kurtzer wrote:

> The underlying components that make up a distribution are in-fact an
> important component to an HPC system in its entirety. There are many
> reasons for this, but I will focus on just a few that I hope don't
> strike too much of a religious chord with people while at the same
> time letting me rant a bit. ;-)

Well, allow me to point out the cow turd you may have stepped in ;-)

> 1) HPC people are quite familiar with building their scientific apps
> with optimized compilers and libraries. If an application is linking
> against any OS libraries (yes, including the C library) it would
> probably make sense to make sure those have been compiled with an
> optimal build environment. Most distributions do not do this,

If the library isn't significantly cpu intensive, then you're better
off sticking to the best-tested option for your compiler. For gcc,
that's -O2. Does gcc even bootstrap at -O3 on your favorite platform?
And pass all the test suites? It's not worth risk unless there's a
significant performance gain.

Bah, humbug, Gentoo, pthui.

-- greg