[Beowulf] first cluster[B

[Mark Hahn]

>>>  Debian (lenny)
>>
>> why?  centos is generally considered the safest choice,
>> unless you're religiously committed to debian.
>
> Almost religiously.  I have found it a very stable platform for
> everything up to clusters.

OK.  you should know that the stability comes from linux itself
and the underlying user-level packages, which have nothing to do 
with the distro (any of them).

> I believe fai can do a variety of install-types, including diskful,
> and nfs root.  But then, I am still in the planning stage, and have no
> practical experience.

well, the thing about nfs root is that there's almost no installation,
per se.  if you wanted, you could boot the nodes off a live master's 
root filesystem.  normally, master and node images are kept mostly
separate, though, because it's handy to avoid entangling them
(ie, you may not want mysql-server installed on compute nodes, but 
only on the master, etc.  or just different versions.)