[Gllug] Don't like to boast but...

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 12:17 -0700, Wal wrote:
> On 6/22/05, John Hearns
>  <john.hearns at streamline-computing.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 12:35 +0100, Ashley Evans wrote:
> 
> > Actually it runs SuSE. We paint go-faster stripes on the side with
> > our SCore parallel environment. Standard MPI libraries, but a low
> > latency gigabit layer. You need low latency to get the parallel
> > performance to acceptable levels.
> 
> The last couple of weeks i hear the word SUSE more  than REDHAT*, that
> was from local vendors representing IBM, SGI, HP, and AMD, is that
> because they jumped into the 2.6 kernel wagon quicker, or in Clusters,
> and HPC environment they have  the technical lead?!

SuSE also had the lead on a 64 bit distribution.
At my last company, when we put in one of the first Opteron clusters in
the UK at Manchester, SuSE had the native x86-64 distro available, but
Redhat did not. We found SuSE to work well with the Opterons, and as far
as I'm aware they still ship SuSE on that platform.

At Streamline we find SuSE works well with Opteron and EMT64
The  SCore environment is supported on SuSE.



The subject of cost and importantly distro lifetime also comes into it,
I'm afraid.
We ship the download SuSE Professional to academic customers.
SuSE/Novell  will keep making updates to that for three years.

We ship Redhat Enterprise, as many commercial ISV codes are certified to
run on it, and commercial customers need that assurance.
I'll be honest and say that a couple of labs/academic sites have the
equivalent of site license deals for RH Enterprise.

We also ship Scientific Linux, which is the distribution from CERN and
Fermilab and is a Redhat 'white box'.


As regards Fedora, we have one customer running Fedora (as far as I'm
aware)
The lifetime of six months for a distro is just too short - we support
clusters for at least three years, and are now extending support on
clusters which we shipped several years ago.
I'm honestly not aware or any penetration of Fedora in the clustering
space.
So if you want a nice 2.6 series kernel to work with your shiny SATA
controllers, etc. SuSE is looking good. Or Scientific Linux (I'm an
enthusiast for SL).


What about Debian?  Debian really has no major presence in the HPC
clustering market. I know - there is FAI etc. 



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