Dear all, my saying as well. See my previous message.
All the best Jörg Am Montag, 3. Februar 2020, 09:31:41 GMT schrieb David Mathog: > On 2020-02-02 19:25, beowulf-requ...@beowulf.org wrote: > >> On Sat, 1 Feb 2020 22:21:09 -0500, you wrote: > >> >Should I consider Solaris or illumos? > >> > >> Unless you are absolutely sure the software you want to run works on > >> Solaris, using Solaris/Illumos is likely asking for trouble. > > > > I'm testing FreeBSD right now and will test *SunOS before commiting a > > full > > deployment. > > Stop wasting time on that - support for OS's other than linux for > academically maintained scientific software is spotty at best. The > only one that even comes close is OS X, because a lot of academics have > Macs, but it would be super expensive to build a cluster out of those. > Moreover, many developers, in biology at least, have pretty much given > up on portability and focus on providing docker images. In those cases > you may find that building from source (needed for maximum performance) > on even common variants like CentOS can be difficult. > > > My initial 3 nodes are socket 940 Opteron based. > > Fine chip in its time, which is however long past. Even a 5 year old > Xeon will run rings around. I say that having just thrown out the last > of my Opterons and replaced them with 5 year old Xeons! > > A bit of research up front on memory and cpu requirments for the > software you want to run should pay off performance wise in the final > cluster. Some code demands a lot of memory but can barely make use of a > second core while other software is exactly the other way around. If > the processing is split between different machines the speed and type of > network connection will be an issue. You need some handle on this > before you start buying hardware because both "a lot of memory" and "a > lot of cores" ups the cost. > > Consider also that you might want to run GPU versions of some programs. > When that is available it can be a significant performance enhancement. > Will each of your nodes be able to support a GPU? Plan ahead as these > often have quite large power requirements which may overload your supply > circuits or overwhelm a room's A/C. > > Regards, > > David Mathog > mat...@caltech.edu > Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
