[Gllug] SLES 11 and TomTom

[John Hearns]

2009/3/31 - Tethys <tethys at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 4:12 PM, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't know how I missed this one, but SLES 11 is released
>> Don't suppose most of you care, but I certainly do.
>
> Out of interest, why? I know SLES is big in the HPC world. Is that just
> due to Novell targetting its marketing budget in that direction and
> actively chasing that market, or does SLES ship with tools and utilities
> useful to the HPC community that aren't found in other distributions? If
> so, which ones?


Good question, which deserves a decent answer.
SuSE has always been ahead with x86-64 kernels - if you remember we
had a SuSE expert come to GLLUG in the early days of Opterons to talk
about the port to that architecture. SuSE were the first off the
blocks with an x86-64 distribution and (to blow my own trumpet) that's
why we installed it on one of the first Opteron clusters in the UK   -
in Manchester. SuSE regularly keep their kernels updated with the
latest fixes.

As you say, in the technical computing field SuSE is the distro of
preference - I don't think that is solely due to marketing. The
applications you run (yes, the paid-for ones) run well on SuSE. In my
finding, I'll stick a thumb in the air and say that 90% of clusters
are SuSE - certainly the ones I've seen.

Regarding tools and utilities, SuSE itself has nothing extra-special.
However, Silicon Graphics provide systems with their ProPack overlay,
which are SuSE systems with SGI utilites, and I'm very happy with what
they provide. Going beyond Beowulf type clusters, if you have a big
NUMA  machine it will be running SuSE.

My post was slightly provocative - I dislike the knee-jerk reaction
that "Debian is Good. Debian Has Everything. You must run Debian."
Horses for courses, and if SuSE have a stable, well supported distro
which works well on 64 bit architectures then I'll use it.
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