[Gllug] Recommended distro

[John Hearns]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 17:14 +0000, Christian Smith wrote:

> In a commercial environment, I'd have thought reliability and support are
> major contributors to whether to choose PCs or SUN kit.
> 
> For CPU clusters, yes, go for the cheap, throw away PCs. Reliability is
> not of as great concern as performance.
Cough.
Reliability is important - for instance using ECC memory,
well tried components and having a good burn-in procedure,
and paying attention to the cooling.

I agree though that it doesn't make sense to have, for example,
redundant PSUs or mirrored disks on compute nodes.
If they go down, there are other nodes in the cluster.

You CAN arrange checkpointing of your code, so you can restart on
other nodes. But that's a user-space task. Grin.

Its common to have redundant features on a compute cluster master node.

And support is important of course - thats what clustering companies
provide.


ps. I shall redeem myself at the next GLLUG or LONIX by drinking beer
and discussing silly things.




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