[Beowulf] What is best OS for GRID or clusters?

[Joe Landman]

Jeremy Baker wrote:
> Any significant reason to use SOLARIS over a Linux distro for 
> development of software?

Most of our customers, if they are still using Solaris and haven't 
retired it, have marked it as a legacy platform.  No new deployments, 
and a gradual phase out of existing ones.

There are a few point solutions (Nexentastor) which are self contained 
appliances that don't factor into many of these discussions, but for the 
most part, Solaris use is on the decline.

We wouldn't recommend it for clusters/grids/clouds, unless you have a 
hard dependency upon it, and no other choice.

> Does the same C/C++ file compile well on both systems? If there are 

Well ... as long as it is well written C/C++, not using OS specific 
hacks, and the compilers are doing the right thing ... it should compile 
well on both.  This said, we've seen (with Fortran anyway) some pretty 
gnarly things compile (which should have thrown errors) on different 
platforms.  YMMV.

> differences where can I find suggested reading material on the topic?
> Advice would be appreciated.
> Baker
> 
-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
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