[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

Jonathan Aquilina jaquilina at eagleeyet.net
Mon Jun 30 20:48:37 PDT 2014


What kind of disk setup do you have on the master node? There is only so
much one master can take in terms of netbooting before you see performance
degridation

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> On 26/06/14 05:08, Kilian Cavalotti wrote:
>
>> You can just use a very minimal OS on your compute nodes, then
>> compile and install all the user facing bits in a shared location.
>> You hand an environment modules system to the users and off they
>> go.
>
> That's pretty much exactly what I've done for the last 8 years or so,
> and it works really well.
>
> Our current incarnation is to netboot a minimal RHEL image on diskless
> nodes (managed via xCAT) and then all the applications are in
> /usr/local including various Perl, Python and R versions with their
> associated module hell.  At the moment we've got about 638 different
> modules across 3 different architectures.
>
> The main reason for RHEL on compute nodes is to keep hardware support
> people happy, most vendors take the Blue Brothers approach to Linux
> ("we support both kinds of Linux, RHEL *and* SLES").
>
> We only have a handful of commercial applications, but we've never had
> an issue with what they support in terms of OS.
>
> All the best,
> Chris
> - --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci
>
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