[Beowulf] Scientific Linux

[Leif Nixon]

Alan Louis Scheinine <alscheinine at tuffmail.us> writes:

>> I See that ScientificLinux has a huge community using it - at least in
>> Europe. Some big research institutes are using it (CERN for example)
> etc. etc.
>
> Sites analyzing LHC data must use Scientific Linux because the associated
> applications install themselves on a specific version (or range of versions)
> of Scientific Linux.

Not really true. We're the largest European tier-1 site for ATLAS, and
we run on a number of different distributions - various versions of
CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu... I think there's even some Scientific
Linux boxes lurking somewhere.

It's not the actual scientific applications that restrict your choice of
distribution, it's the grid middleware stacks. We run ARC, which is very
portable. The other European tier-1:s run gLite, which is tightly
integrated to the base OS, and *then* your freedom of choice is much
smaller. Still, you can pick (at least) any of {SL, CentOS, RHEL} 4,
they are all basically the same thing.

-- 
Leif Nixon                       -            Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre    -      Linkoping University
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