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

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Sun, 2 Feb 2020 21:51:21 -0500, you wrote:

>I'm testing FreeBSD right now and will test *SunOS before commiting a full
>deployment.
>
>My initial 3 nodes are socket 940 Opteron based.  I'm planning to acquire
>two nodes of dual cpu hexacore Xeons for the cost of a small road trip next
>weekend (otherwise free).
>
>The more I think about it, maybe I'll have two clusters, one for Opterons
>and one for Xeons.
>
>I'm currently out of work on medical leave and don't have a lot of free
>capital.

Fair enough, without a budget then you need to use what you either
have on hand or can get for free regardless of how slow it may be.

So the question then becomes is this something so you have a challenge
to take up your time all day, or do you actually want to get some
research done?

If it's for a challenge, then by all means try and get Solaris or even
one of the *bsd's working with the appropriate software - it will
likely give you weeks if not months of challenges.

But if you actually want to do research then as others have said then
you really need to choose a version of Linux and move on to doing the
research.

Similarly, why the insistence on ZFS?  Without a budget you are
unlikely to have the storage capacity where ZFS typically kicks in as
being appropriate.