Mike Davis wrote:
Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mike Davis wrote:
My experience is similar to Bill's. We've been using CentOs 3,4 for
the past few years on our larger clusters. It is a good choice for
stability, good performance, and since it is RH for SW compatability.
The only thing I'd comment on that is negative about it is one of its
"advantages". There is a narrow line between stability and stagnation,
and you have to figure out which side of that line your cluster will
fall on. Specifically, the fact that Centos/RHEL is frozen for two year
intervals has two disadvantages for some people:
I don't see this as a problem in a production cluster. The fact is that
I've been doing this stuff for a little over two decades and I can build
anything that I need for an application. For me a manual library build
for CentOs 3 is easier than trying to find support for FC4 or
reinstalling FC 1x per year. My CentOs 3 nodes have had less than 2hours
downtime in 2 years and that was due to a Power Upgrade at their
location, that required a complete shutdown of all machines on the floor.
Now I should say, that I don't use diskless nodes, each node has its own
OS disk and most have a separate /tmp disk for scratch use. That is one
reason that we differ on OS, I believe.
Guess I've only been doing this for about 14 years. Thanks! I feel
younger already.
I prefer a disk on each node, with a backup OS and /tmp. We PXEboot all
our nodes, and we update the node OS when we update the PXE stuff, too.
I've had episodes where we lost a node and were able to salvage some
degree of a run, so I think it's justified. It can make restarts of MM5
a little interesting, however.
I prefer to not bring down the clusters for a rather random OS upgrade,
so we, too, tend to run older stuff. Unlike RGB, my codes are pretty
happy with the older libraries. I guess I'm lucky.
Still, when we do up grade, I'll be putting Fedora on both clusters. As
RGB states, so much of the "extra" stuff is already integrated that my
workload to compile by hand is reduced.
gerry
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.862.3982 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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