[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Joe Landman]

Hi Mike


Mike Davis wrote:
> Andy,
> 
> Debian is a possibility. I know that my friends in the UK and throughout 
> Europe like it.

FWIW:  Ubuntu is quite good.  Several of the versions have an N year 
support window (3-5, I don't remember N pre-coffee).

I am migrating my laptop away from SuSE to Ubuntu.  Stuff just works. 
And when I needed to rebuild a kernel for a customer, building it as a 
correctly packaged system was simply not painful.  It was, almost, easy.

This is what got me.  apt-get is about the same as yum if you use yum (I 
had ported earlier versions to SuSE, and it was a royal pain, but yum 
makes installation and update so much saner).

FWIW:  what pushed me away from SuSE was not the Microsoft agreement (I 
had thought, before a certain Microsoft CEO opened his mouth, that it 
could have been a good thing).  It was zmd, zypp, and the other bits. 
That when logging in for the first time on my laptop (and all other SuSE 
machines), it ran this update-whatever program that consumed all the 
cycles and did nothing.  That and the updates didn't work.  It was good 
in its day, but its day has passed.  And Ubuntu appears to be better. 
Installation is easy.

> 
> We have been running CentOS for our current lifecycle of Opteron 
> machines. It is a trivial job to get most of the scientific software 
> that we run operational (including several commercial packages which 
> shall remain unamed). It does a good job on the hardware. We have an 
> install time of less than 30 minutes per node.It is supported for at 
> least one machine life cycle. In short, it works for our purposes.
> 
> But, I'm open to change as long as that change brings improvement.
> 
> 
> Mike
> 
> Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 10:01:58PM -0500, Mike Davis wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> Joe is right about the stability factor.
>>>
>>> Stability, stability, stability.
>>>
>>>
>>> Mike Davis
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>> Debian: released every 18 months - two years. Guaranteed to support 
>> previous version for a year after release. Seamless upgrade path - 
>> well, nearly :)
>> 17,740 packages in Debian main. Pure 64 bit distribution. Some
>> Beowulf-type software already packed. Runs out of the box on 
>> Alpha/Sun/AMD64 (and will deal with legacy 32 bit hardware identically 
>> so that you can have the same app. on cluster and desktops
>> if you really must.)
>> Supported by (at least) HP (and IBM if you ask them) on their hardware.
>>
>> Licence cost $0, annual Linux vendor support fee cost $0. Network 
>> updates readily available from more than one mirror site per country 
>> where feasible.
>>
>> What's not to like ? :)
>>
>> This very quickly, as I must get dressed for work. I'd like to come 
>> back to this point in more detail later.
>>
>> Andy
>>
>>
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> 
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-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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