Dear Jonathan, here at UCL we are running a number of different distros as it looks like.
I am using Debian for my clusters now for the last 5 years or so without any problems. In fact, I have upgraded from Debain etch up to jessie, the latest, over the time and I never had any real issues. Of course I had to recompile the HPC code which is not part of the distribution but that is something you have to do anyway. The clusters are running stable without any issues regarding OS (i.e. not hardware failures). The upgrade in Debian is working really well. You really can install a machine once and then you can upgrade it to the latest OS without much issues. You might need to do some minor tweaks when things are changing, like going from NFS3 to NFS4, but that is in the nature of the upgrade. This experience seems to be in stark difference from the OS upgrade on the central cluster (RedHat) where the cluster needed to be installed from scratch. At least that was my understanding. A source based one like Gentoo might be good for a desktop but with a Cluster you don't want to spent all the time in compiling the OS. You do want to spent time to make sure the HPC programs are running with the best efficiency you can get. Thus, I rather spent time into compiling a proper BLAS instead of spending time to optimise say gcc. Thus, I would recommend a package based distribution and not a source based one and I would recommend Debian as the distro of choice here. My two pennies from London. :-) Jörg On Thursday 19 May 2016 09:08:22 remy. dernat wrote: > Hi, > If you need certified things like drivers or whatever (IB...), choose > redhat-like. Otherwise, IMHO debian-like is a betteer choice. > Gentoo could be use for development, or test purpose. I do not think it is > really a good choice. Cheers. > > > Envoyé depuis mon appareil Samsung > > -------- Message d'origine -------- > De : Jonathan Aquilina <jaquil...@eagleeyet.net> > Date : 19/05/2016 06:20 (GMT+01:00) > À : Beowulf Mailing List <beowulf@beowulf.org> > Objet : [Beowulf] cluster os > > > Good Morning, > I am just wondering what distribution of choice would one use for their > cluster? Would one go for a source based distro like gentoo or a > precompiled one like Centos7? -- ************************************************************* Dr. Jörg Saßmannshausen, MRSC University College London Department of Chemistry 20 Gordon Street London WC1H 0AJ email: j.sassmannshau...@ucl.ac.uk web: http://sassy.formativ.net Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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