On 8 Oct 2007, at 4:21 pm, Mark Hahn wrote:
the distribution has nothing to do with your hardware.
just choose a distro that you are comfortable with - there cannot
possibly be any general answer, since all extremes of personal/
professional preference are represented.
personally, I choose RH-ish distros (centos, fedora) mainly because
they are fairly conventional in structure as visible to the admin.
for instance, no gratuitous reinvention of sysvinit, widely used
package format, etc.
IMO, your master node is over-powered both cpu and memory-wise.
if you have a single master node in a cluster, it performs three
main duties:
- fileserver. this requires practically no cpu or memory, just disks
and net. if you have a cachable read-heavy workload, then more
memory on a fileserver may not be wasted.
- cluster management, such as syslogs, scheduler, etc. very low
cpu or memory load here.
That's not always true. It depends on the scheduler and the
workload. LSF, for example, keeps its list of pending jobs in RAM as
well as on disk. This can make the scheduler use a lot of memory if
the number of pending jobs is large (and for embarrassingly parallel
workloads that number can be very large indeed). Our scheduler node
(with 8GB RAM) ran out of memory once when a particularly over-
zealous user submitted 1.5 million jobs in one go... needless to
say, the user in question had the cluebat vigorously applied, but to
LSF's credit, it kept going. Just veeerrrrryyyy
sllllooooowwwwlllllyyyyy.
- logins. this might be the place people run the compiler, etc.
but unless they're doing heavy visualization, only a small fraction
of a cpu per user is necessary, and not much memory.
rather than spending a lot of money on a highly configured master
node,
I'd probably split admin/fileservice to a box "uncontaminated" by
users.
But still, I agree with you, in general. Actually, these days, we
keep the LSF master on a separate node from the login nodes, to
protect it from wayward user action.
Tim
--
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