[Beowulf] General cluster management tools - Re: Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

[Andrew Holway]

> With regards to risk perception, I am still blown away at some of the
> conversations I have with prospective customers who, still to this day,
> insist that "larger company == less risk".  This is demonstrably false.
>
> A company with open products (real open products), open software stacks,
> ... that lowers risks.  With the closed, vendor lock-in stacks, you
> increase risk.  And this is, perversely, what is called "lowering risk"
> by people looking for an excuse to go with the larger company.

This is also demonstrably false. Just because cluster vendor A is
using a completely open source stack does not mean that you have any
less risk then Cluster Vendor B with their proprietary closed source
stack.

I have seen Rocks clusters that are an utter bag of shieße because the
people deploying it had no clue and also seen Clusters based on Bright
et al that were perfectly executed. And vice versa for that matter.

The risk is with the people doing the deployment and the choices that
the customer makes. It just takes some bad memory or a batch of bad
motherboards and the whole project goes to crap as trust is lost.

Please save these arguments for the Richard Stallman appreciation society.