[Beowulf] Which distro for the cluster?

[Chetoo Valux]

Dear all,

As a Linux user I've worked with several distros as RedHat, SuSE, Debian and
derivatives, and recently Gentoo.

Now I face the challenge of building a HPC for scientific calculations, and
I wonder which distro would suit me best. As a Gentoo user, I've recognised
the power of customisation, optimisation and lightweight system, for
instance my 4 years old laptop flies like a youngster, and some desktops
too. So I thought about building the HPC nodes (8+1 master) with Gentoo ....

But then it comes the administration and maintenance burden, which for me it
should be the less, since my main task here is research ... so browsing the
net I found Rocks Linux with plenty of clustering docs and administration
tools & guidelines. I feel this should be the choice in my case, even if I
sacrifice some computation efficiency.

Any advice on this will be appreciated.

Chetoo.
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