[Beowulf] solaris?

[Joe Landman]

On 02/14/2017 04:28 PM, Michael Di Domenico wrote:
> just out of morbid curiosity, does Solaris even have a stake in HPC
> anymore?  I've not heard boo about it in quite awhile and there
> doesn't appear to be even one system on the top500 running it.

Solaris is effectively dead (IMO).

SmartOS is its logical progression (https://smartos.org) with the caveat 
of a tight hardware compatibility list.  If what you have works within 
it, it is a nice way to run things*.  You can combine it with Fifo 
(https://project-fifo.net/) and build a nice container friendly data 
center.  Not typical HPC workloads, but quite nice for the modern 
container centric view of the world.

SmartOS has what are called "lx branded zones" which enable you to run 
(some) linux binary code 'natively'.  That is, the zone handles syscall 
emulation.

* I'm biased as I helped set up some infrastructure with this before, 
and it was relatively painless to use.  Think of it as a predecessor to 
CoreOS, RancherOS, and others.


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Joe Landman
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