[Beowulf] Anybody using Redhat HPC Solution in their Beowulf

[Joe Landman]

On 10/22/2010 12:23 PM, Richard Chang wrote:

> I am satisfied with Rocks, but my group people wanted something well
> supported that means, RHEL instead of CentOS and "some other PAID"
> cluster manager instead of Rocks, especially, when we have the
> budget.
>
> Somehow, I have not been able to convince my folks that Rocks is a
> much better solution than the PAID ones.

Hmmm ... define "better".  Rocks has its strengths and weaknesses. It is 
fine as a basic distribution.  We've used all manner of cluster 
distributions, rolled our own, leveraged others.

It all comes down to what you want and need to do.  If you have very 
windows-y admins who are classically terrified of anything that looks 
like a CLI, Rocks might not be the most appropriate system.  If you have 
a complex networking or storage environment, it may take a bit more 
effort to encode that into various cluster distros.

Generally the free systems, Perceus, Rocks, XCat2, Onesis, ... do pretty 
good jobs, but "some assembly required."  Completely turnkey distros 
exist on the paid side, with varying degrees of admin friendliness. 
There are stacks from Bright Computing, Penguin, Platform, RedHat, 
Streamline-Computing, and a few others.

(disclosure: we've built/recommended/sold systems with many of these 
tools in the past, free and commercial)

Admin time/effort/friendliness is not something to be discounted. 
Better is in the eye of the beholder.

I do recommend at least one "roll your own" setup at least once, so you 
get a better appreciation for what the packages do.

Just my $0.021 USD (sorry, inflation is creeping up)

Joe

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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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