[Beowulf] cluster os

[Michael Di Domenico]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
> I've always found it curious that many vendors officially only support Red Hat and friends, but when you ask the engineers, you find they're using Debian to do the development work.  I guess that's just commercial reality though.


it was explained to me, right or wrong, that this decision to only
support offical distro's like SUSE or RHEL stemmed from two major
points; 1. rhel/suse generally have a more stable update system with a
predictable path.  with rhel's huge leap in v7 this might not really
be wholly true anymore.  but the larger issue, is point 2.  whereby,
suse and rhel are commercial entities in which legal verbiage can be
tied to and leveraged.  this is the reason, i believe, why some
vendors will now support ubuntu, but still not "officially" support
debian

i've seen this argument made a few times having worked for HPC vendors
and now government contracting, so i think it holds some weight.  but
i'm not a lawyer so take it as my opinion...