[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Lawrence Stewart]

On Jun 24, 2014, at 2:43 AM, Jonathan Aquilina <jaquilina at eagleeyet.net> wrote:

> Hey guys,
> 
> I am just curious as I have recently switched to Gentoo for every day use
> due to its customizability and how everything is compiled for a particular
> system.  Has anyone used Gentoo in an HPC application?
> 
> Regards,
> Jonathan

The SiCortex software distribution was Gentoo.  (SiCortex is gone now, but from
2006-2009 was shipping systems up to 5832 cores in a single cabinet, about 10 TF)

The compute nodes were 64-bit MIPS, and Gentoo provided a good way to
build everything from sources, and to include local patches during build.

The front-end machine was an x86 server, and ran Gentoo as well at first
but in the last release was converted to RedHat.

In this case, Gentoo was used as a a convenient build environment
for SiCortex.  I don’t think any customers ever recompiled the whole system
although some imported new ebuilds to get packages that weren’t
included.

There are rumors that some SC machines might go to the Computer Museum
or the National Cryptologic Museum.  That would be pretty nice.

-Larry