[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Gavin W. Burris]

On Wed 06/25/14 05:29PM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> RHEL doesn't cut it for these people: they know that they want later
> GCC / different commercial compilers / hand written assembly 

Any OS flavor will allow for all of these, including RHEL.  I'm not sure
how RHEL prevents any of this.

>-  a later kernel with a smarter scheduler ...

I'd really like to be sold on the latest 3.x kernel scheduler, but I am
not sure that it would provide a significant performance improvement for
a loaded compute node.

> At this point, you might as well get your local team to support Debian
> on this - and you will have all the extra packages that Debian may
> provide over RHEL :)

I like having a local team.  But I like backing them up, too.  When they
hit a weird hardware error or performance problem, they should be able
to call an expert systems engineer that has the aggregate experience
from many deployments.

Cheers,
-- 
Gavin W. Burris
Senior Project Leader for Research Computing
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania