[Beowulf] cluster os

[John Hanks]

I like looking at this: http://imgur.com/8yHC8 and thinking about how many
millions of lines of code and thousands of developers and contributors that
represents.

I once got some good gardening tips from a person who believed woodland
fairies came out at night and tended his garden. You can get a lot of
opinions about OS distributions in a place like this list, but that guy had
as much chance at catching one of those fairies as any person, group,
company, project, [insert_entity_here] has at *ever* producing a STABLE
release of a linux distro. My suggestion is to set aside any advice that
hinges on stability, long term release cycles, support matrixes, etc. and
try a few flavors, evaluate the available tools for deploying and managing
a cluster, look at what any proprietary packages you use choose to support
and pick the distro which makes you the most comfortable and causes the
least amount of pain. For me and the environment I support those distros
today are CentOS 6 & 7. This is continually re-evaluated and when another
distro proves to actually be less painful (as opposed to having more
powerful woodland fairies), I'll happily switch. My criteria may have no
relation to your criteria and if so, my choice is irrelevant to you. As
with performance, your application is the best benchmark.

To stretch my analogy, when getting any advice on Linux or technology in
general, it's extremely important to know when people are talking about
woodland fairies and when they are actually passing on solid advice ("sales
engineers" tend to talk about woodland fairies a lot). In the realm of OS
choice, topics like "stability", "package managers", "desktop usability",
"long term releases", etc. are all woodland fairies.

jbh

Disclaimer: Apologies to any woodland fairies on the list who are offended
by this, I simply use this group for the analogy and it was not intended to
anger anyone.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Jonathan Aquilina <jaquilina at eagleeyet.net>
wrote:

> Good Morning,
>
> I am just wondering what distribution of choice would one use for their
> cluster? Would one go for a source based distro like gentoo or a
> precompiled one like Centos7?
>
>
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