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

[Joe Landman]

On 09/16/2012 05:44 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 10:43:57PM +0200, Andrew Holway wrote:
>
>> case in point: We have based a reasonable chunk of our backend
>> infrastructure on openindiana. http://lwn.net/Articles/514046/. What
>> do we do now?
>
> Choose more carefully next time? Just like you have to do a little due

Well played Greg, well played :)

Actually, as OpenIndiana is one of a series of closely related 
distributions, Andrew could, if he wished, simply choose Illumian, or 
any of the 4 or 5 OpenSolaris rebuilds based upon the Illumos kernel.

That is, he could, unless he wanted to do something else.

Or, he could *PAY* someone to develop it for him.  Last I saw, you can 
download the source code to OI, and go to town.  There is a full build 
environment, and the stack is self hosting.

So ... the point of that straw man is ... what ... again?

> diligence before deciding if a commercial vendor is a good bet, you
> should also evaluate open source projects to see if they're a good
> bet.

Yup.  Absolutely.  You don't go with a project *simply* for one 
attribute.  You evaluate all of the costs (hidden or overt), all the 
benefits, and lay down all the risks.  If the OI's core developer 
leaving completely derails your project, chances are, it wasn't well 
conceived of in the first place.

>
> Better yet, ask other people whose careers have depended on the
> successful results of their choices what they would do in your
> circumstances.

Yup.  Absolutely.

>
> -- greg
>
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-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics Inc.
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