[Beowulf] Forwarded from a long time reader having trouble posting

[Gerald Creager]

Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 03:04:32PM -0600, Gerald Creager wrote:
>> A combination of mostly kernel improvements, and some useful middleware  
>> as RedHat and by extension, CentOS, seek to get farther into the cluster  
>> space.
>> gerry
>>
> 
> Maybe also some licensing breaks on large volume licensing. Red Hat is 
> primarily a sales and service organisation that also produces a Linux 
> by-product :) The HPC variant is targetted at areas which deal in large 
> clusters at cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise Linux for servers at 
> equivalent volume, IIRC.
> 
>> Toon Knapen wrote:
>>> Any idea why it gives better performance? Was it on memory bw intensive 
>>> apps? Could it be due to changes in the kernel that take into account  
>>> the Numa architecture (affinity) or ...
>>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Tom Elken <tom.elken at qlogic.com  
>>> <mailto:tom.elken at qlogic.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>      > On Behalf Of Gerald Creager
>>>      > I've been quite happy with CentOS 5.3 and we're experimenting with
>>>      > CentOS 5.4 now.  I see good stability in 5.[34]
>>>
>>>     I have to second the recommendation of 5.3 or 5.4.
> 
> I like 5.2 and 5.4 but my normal experience is on relatively stock IBM 
> hardware. As ever, YMMV.
> 
>>>      > > Dear all,
>>>      > >
>>>      > > I've been working on hpux-itanium for the last 2 years (and even
>>>      > > unsubscribed to beowulf-ml during most of that time, my bad)
>>>     but soon
>>>      > > will turn back to a beowulf cluster (HP DL380G6's with Xeon X5570,
>>>      > > amcc/3ware 9690SA-8i with 4 x 600GB Cheetah 15krpm). Now I have
>>>     a few
>>>      > > questions on the config.
>>>      > >
>>>      > > 1) our company is standardised on RHEL 5.1. Would sticking with
>>>     rhel
>>>      > 5.1
>>>      > > instead of going to the latest make a difference.
> 
> Since you have up to date hardware - also check on the necessary version 
> of 3Ware drivers and where they are supported. The command line 
> utilities are particularly useful.
> 
>>>      > > 2) What are the advantages of the hpc version of rhel. I
>>>     browsed the
>>>      > doc
>>>      > > but unless having to compile mpi myself I do not see a
>>>     difference or
>>>      > did
>>>      > > I miss soth.
> 
> See above.
> 
>>>      > > 3) which filesystem is advisable knowing that we're calculating on
>>>      > large
>>>      > > berkeley db databases
>>>      > >
> 
> You get ext3 or Red Hat's cluster filesystem ?? GFS ??, I think. No xfs 
> / Reiser by default. Check also with HP as to what file systems they 
> would recommend. 
> 
> 
>>>      > > thanks in advance,
>>>      > >
>>>      > > toon
>>>      > >
>>>      > > Toon Knapen toon.knapen at gmail.com <mailto:toon.knapen at gmail.com>
>>>      > >
> 
> Always happy to pontificate :)


I believe xfs is now available in 5.4.  I'd have to check.  We've found 
xfs to be our preference (but we're revisiting gluster and lustre). 
I've not played with gfs so far.

gerry