[Beowulf] A Good Linux Distribution to Start with?

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Tilman Koschnick <til at belleville.ch> writes:

> Richard Miguel San Martin wrote:
> > Hi all, I was reading the thread about this topic and i cannt see
> > some opinion about
> > debian as an good distribution for clusters HPC. So, i know that is possible
> > build a cluster with debian .. but i ask you is a good solution too?.. exist
> > some successfull implementation with debian ?.
> > Thanks
> > R. Miguel
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
> I'm running Debian and Redhat on clusters, and much prefer Debian. I'd

Ditto.  We've been using Debian on our commercial proprietary cluster
for over five years and wouldn't run anything else.

Take care,

> say Debian is a good solution for about any environment, if you can put
> up with not being on the bleeding edge with regards to software
> versions. Which in my book is a plus (not being bleeding edge, that is).
> I like things to be a bit more on the conservative side, well tried and
> tested, and to have longer release cycles. Besides, you can always work
> with backports to the current stable version. The coming version, 3.1
> aka Sarge, is already in pretty good shape and will be released any time
> soon (I'm using it already in a cluster environment).
> 
> Apart from speed of release, Debian scores high in all other aspects:
> Superb software management (dpkg/apt), huge archive of already included
> and tested software (http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages), sensible
> defaults on package configurations, good bug tracking system, plenty of
> support on mailing lists. I could go on, but that might slip into
> religious realms :-)
> 
> The only problem I had were clients wanting 2nd level support for third
> party software, and most software vendors don't certify for Debian. Most
> software still runs fine, it's the same Linux under the hood after all,
> but with many commercial products, you're on your own.
> 
> Cheers, Til
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 

-- 
Camm Maguire			     			camm at enhanced.com
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah