[Gllug] 2.6.31 is out

[John Hearns]

2009/9/13 John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com>:

> Also you would have a damn sight big problem to install Debian on a
> large Altix system (or even a small one!). And why would you if the
> supplier installs and supports SuSE on it?

I Google, and prove myself wrong:
http://osdir.com/ml/debian.ports.ia64/2006-12/msg00019.html

Though as to WHY you would take a highly performant SMP system, with
support from the manufacturer, and spend days of effort on installing
Debian on it I couldn't say.

Expanding my point a little further, when you buy an HPC system you
SHOULD be getting an entire software stack with it - not bare metal
which you happily spend weeks farting around with.
A software stack will involve management untilities for the nodes -
installing them via PXE, perhaps running them in RAMdisk, imaging
nodes etc. Plus drivers for the cluster interconnect - maybe
low-latency gig E, Myrinet or Infiniband.
Then comes the parallel libraries - various MPI libraries and
optimised maths libraries, and compilers (there ARE other compilers
than GCC, and they perform better. If they didn't no-one would buy
them!). Plus performance measurement and monitoring packages.
Mostly this turns out as Redhat or SuSE based stacks - as the system
is being bought to run commercial codes which are said to run under RH
or SuSE.
(For RH read RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux). (For SuSE read SLES or
OpenSuse).


Before those who have drunk the Debian Kool-aid say it, yes Debian
does have Infiniband drivers and MPI libraries, I can't deny that.
However, just try an apt-get of $your-flavour-of-MPI. You'll probably
get a highly out of date version. Same goes actually for the RPM based
distros - you'll get a version which was packaged up at the time of
the distros creation. That's where cluster venodrs come in - they will
install and test a recent  version of (say) OpenMPI and the OFED
stack. And you DO want a recent version - remember, you bought the
latest whizzy Infiniband cards and They Don't Work without version
1.99.99 plus.
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