[Beowulf] Virtualization in head node ?

[Greg Kurtzer]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 5:15 AM, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

[snip]

> On servers I run Centos or RHEL (licenses and all) as the vendor of the
> software requires.  Generally Centos on top, then VMware, then RHEL VMs.
> Works fine.  The only bad thing I've seen about Centos in the past is
> the dark side of a long term freeze -- some very useful tools and
> libraries have been in rapid development (notably the GSL and Yum).
> RHEL 4 just sucked in this regard, with up2date instead of yum, and an
> early, broken version of the GSL.  Fedora is too fast, RHEL too slow.
> What can you do?
>

We have tried maintaining that balance with Caos Linux, and focusing
now on Caos NSA (Node Server Appliance) which makes it a decent HPC
solution (at least that is what we are going for) for many of the
reasons that we have stated.

Warning, it is not intended to be anything aside from a cluster/server
type of solution so don't try it on your laptop. ;)

http://www.caoslinux.org/

Greg
-- 
Greg M. Kurtzer
Chief Technology Officer
HPC Systems Architect
Infiscale, Inc. - http://www.infiscale.com