[Beowulf] G5 beowulf cluster

[Chris Dagdigian]

The Mac OS X server OS that came with your Xserve G5s is quite good and 
you'll find all the developer tools, compilers, cluster scheduler 
systems like Grid Engine or LSF are all working and well supported. The 
scientific community of G5/Xserve users is growing quite rapidly.

If you are familiar with Linux the learning curve for OS X is not all 
that bad.

http://www.apple.com/science/  -- may help
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/ -- also

You may want to make the OS decision based on what physics apps you need 
to run and how *they* are supported on OS X vs Linux. I can't help you 
there as I'm a life sciences / biology person.

In our lab we've installed both Gentoo Linux as well as Yellow Dog on 
Xserve G5s. Both seemed to install and run smoothly but for production 
clustering work we still use the OS X Server OS.

-Chris


Carlos Lopez Nataren wrote:

> Hello, we, at the physics institute in Mexico have got four Xserve G5
> and we would like to use them as a beowulf, my first doubt is about what
> operating system to use, we've been using linux for our other clusters,
> even a G4 one, but I haven't seen anything about G5, is there a linux
> distribution that runs well on this type of machines? or do I better use
> the operating system they came with? or are there any documentation out
> there outlining the way they should be configured to be used as a
> beowulf?
> 
> Thank you very much for any help.
> natorro
> 

-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
BioTeam  - Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
Office: 617-665-6088, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
PGP KeyID: 83D4310E iChat/AIM: bioteamdag  Web: http://bioteam.net