[Beowulf] Opteron/Athlon Clustering

[Joe Landman]

Robert G. Brown wrote:

>
>
>To put it another way, I think that an Opteron equipped to transparently
>run 32 bit binaries is a superior configuration to one that isn't.  
>

Agreed, unless you want to jump to pure 64 bit out of the gate.  This 
can cause significant pain if you have one of those closed source apps 
that you cannot live without.

>The
>benefit of the work required to so equip it is nonlinear and highly
>dependent on local environment and task.  The cost of the work required
>to equip it is CURRENTLY still rather high as everybody is doing
>one-offs of it.  
>

I disagree.  Not everyone is doing one offs of it.  Some distros include 
this, and will support it.  You simply make a choice as to whether or 
not you want to pay them money for the work they did to do this.

I am using SuSE 9.0 in this mode without problems.   I use nedit 
binaries (too lazy to compile myself), and a number of other tools that 
are 32 bit only on the dual Opteron. 

That said, it makes a great deal of sense to recompile computationally 
intensive apps for the 64 bit mode of the Opteron.  Not that it will 
make Jove faster, but it does quite nicely for BLAST, HMMer, and others, 
including my old molecular dynamics stuff.  The 64 bit versions are 
faster by a bit.

Joe