[Beowulf] Clustering VPS servers

[Joe Landman]

On 03/22/2013 10:25 AM, Mark Hahn wrote:

> I'm a bit skeptical about whether non-distro kernels will make a 
> noticable difference - if anyone has examples, I'd appreciate hearing 
> about them. 

For stability, performance, etc ... we try our best to avoid the distro 
kernels.   Its fairly easy to crash a number of them under even moderate 
file/block serving loads.  Couple this with a number of the ancient 
drivers they use for RAID and network systems, it takes years before you 
can take advantage of functionality (PCIe error reporting, bug fixes, 
performance tweaks, etc.) in the latest drivers as compared with what 
the distro kernels ship.

Do remember that the distro kernels are tweaked for their most common 
workloads.  Which isn't HPC, storage, cloud, etc.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://scalableinformatics.com
        http://scalableinformatics.com/siflash
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615