[Beowulf] A press release

[Joe Landman]

Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> Mark Hahn wrote:

[...]

> If you want to have a religious war about which distro to use, go
> somewhere else. I'm sure there are plenty of mailing lists and
> newsgroups where I'm sure that happens every day.

Hmmm.... for me, its all about the kernel.  Thats 90+% of the battle. 
Some distros use good kernels, some do not.  I won't mention who I think 
is in the latter category.

FWIW:  we tend to build systems and place our own kernel on them. 
Basically we want them to work, and not be surprised by bad things, like 
crashes due to 4k stacks or backported (mis)features.  We also want them 
to have updated drivers, and NFS/file system bits.

> This is a mailing list about beowulf clusters, and the last time I
> checked, you can create clusters using any Linux distribution you like,
> or even non-Linux operating systems, such as IRIX, Solaris, etc.

With all due respect, I think Mark knows what this list is about.

There are lots of folks out there using Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, 
SuSE, ...

We generally don't care which distro is used.  Only that the kernel is 
reasonable, stable under load, and supports updated file systems/network 
capability.

Beowulf depends upon good kernels at the end of the day.  You need high 
performance and stability throughout.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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phone: +1 734 786 8423
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