[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Joe Landman]

On 06/25/2014 12:18 PM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:

> In my experience, Red Hat is often the first, if not the only, supported
> OS for a commercial Linux application.  This is due to the

This hasn't been true, as far as I know, ever (first and/or only). 
We've had seen hard requirements by commercial/closed source apps* for

SLES $RandomVersion
Fedora $RandomVersion
Old/Ancient versions of RHEL including  RHEL 3.x-5.x
Ubuntu 8.x/10.x

Usually with incompatible mixes of

HPMPI (built with a hard wired/broken IB stack)
MPICH/MVAPICH (very specific versions)
Intel MKL (very specific versions)
PGI compiler + libs
...

I don't want to name/shame offenders (some of them read this list and 
are at least aware of the issues).

This is getting better over time, as internal development processes 
improve.  But hard coding to a particular platform results in hard 
choices at cluster build time if you want to deploy a fixed image.

Happily, as noted, kvm and Docker have effectively obviated the need to 
worry about this.

* engineering, comp chem, financial, ... etc.



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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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