[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Douglas Eadline]

A while ago, as a consultant, I managed an HPC cluster.
The client was paying for RH licenses every year. (actually
more than they were paying me). I asked them once "how often to you
call RH with issues?" Their reply, "We don't, we call you
because you understand HPC stuff."

And of course, from the HW vendor, "you can't use that
IB driver version because it has not been qualified to
run on the hardware ... we only support RHEL version ..."

In my experience, RH has never brought much value HPC.
I'm not blaming or shamming, it is just not their thing.
I'm just not sure you will get much help calling support
with and opensm issue or new IB driver.

And as we all know, HPC has always been the home of
the "rugged individualists" (or "stubborn assholes"
not sure which) that do their own thing
to make things work. It is the nature of the HPC game.

Maybe it is time for an HPC Linux distro, this is where
Scientific Linux seemed to be headed, but then was stopped because
CentOS worked just as well. And Red Hat's latest move would have
killed it in any case.

This is a much longer discussion, but now I have to go
step on garden rakes while figuring out how to get some
small Java package to build with Gradle (don't ask).

--
Doug





> We're all ears...
>
>
> Bill
>
> On 6/26/23 3:00 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
>>
>> I'll have more to say later and to me the irony of this situation is
>> Red Hat has become what they were created to prevent*.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Doug
>>
>> * per conversations with Bob Young back in the day
> We're all ears...
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-- 
Doug