[Beowulf] First cluster in 20 years - questions about today

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Sat, 1 Feb 2020 22:21:09 -0500, you wrote:

>Should I consider Solaris or illumos?  I do plan on using ZFS, especially
>for the data node, but I want as much redundancy as I can get, since I'm
>going to be using used hardware.  Will the fancy Solaris cluster tools be
>useful?

Unless you are absolutely sure the software you want to run works on
Solaris, using Solaris/Illumos is likely asking for trouble.

You can get ZFS on FreeBSD, or if you are willing to overlook the
license issues my understanding Ubuntu works quite well with ZFS.

As for hardware, what do you mean by "used"?

Thanks to AMD the performance of newer hardware is signficantly better
than something 5+ years old, and relatively speaking not necessarily
that expensive, with added benefits of less power required than
anything 10+ years old.