[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Mike Davis]

Joe is right about the stability factor.

I have staff that try to ride the bleeding edge of FC on their desktops, 
and most of the time it works fine. But, for my clusters I want a stable 
and long term supportable OS. I can't afford an upgrade costing downtime 
or lack of availability. I also can't afford major upgrades every 18 
months. My number one desire is supported stability. My number two 
desire is speed.  Maybe this philosophy comes from all of my years in 
unix world (21 and counting), but the idea of standardizing on something 
that has the limited longterm support of FC scares me. We regulalry run 
nodes for years without reboot.

Right now there are projects that are still at FC2  for their stable 
versions (open-ssi for instance). But FC2 is dead. I think that the dev 
version of open-ssi is FC3, but it's dead too. 

I do not run diskless nodes. I test sample hardware for power usage, 
heat output, and stability before purchasing it in quantity. A working 
cluster is not the place that I want to experiment with "maybe's." Just 
because an OS isn't the newest is not a bad thing.

Stability, stability, stability.


Mike Davis





Joe Landman wrote:

>
>
> Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
>
>> Robert G. Brown wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 15 Apr 2007, John Hearns wrote:
>>>
>>>> And re. the future version of Scientific Linux, there has been 
>>>> debate on the list re. co-operating with CENTos and essentially 
>>>> using CENTos as a base, and SL being an overlay of specific 
>>>> application and library RPMs.
>>>> Pros and cons either way there.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> IMO, most cluster builders will find it more advantageous to track the
>>> FC releases instead of using RHEL or Centos or things derived 
>>> therefrom.
>>
>
>  Only if they are not building clusters for commercial customers, or 
> customers with specific OS (distro) requirements.  FC simply will not 
> fly in a shop that demands long term support.  We deal with lots of 
> these.
>