Re: [gentoo-cluster] Gentoo vs RedHat cluster

[Donnie Berkholz]

Brady Catherman wrote:
> So the short of it is that higher is always better, and this is only a
> 'best as I personally' could do comparison.

OK, thanks for the clarification. Have you also run lmbench?

> After our conversion things went together much smoother and now
> maintenance is fairly painless. I spend all of my time setting up our
> Apple cluster (The Gentoo ppc64 performance just wasn't good enough to
> wow the management into using it =)

Yeah, from the numbers it looks as if it would be dependent on the
purpose of the cluster whether OS X or Gentoo would do better. On ppc,
Gentoo does poorly on the first two benchmarks and also on context
switching. On x86, the first two are more comparable with RH, but the
others, Gentoo has a small to large advantage over RH, just as on ppc.

> One big advantage of Gentoo is the ease in which new programs/libraries
> can be installed. I have written dozens of ebuilds for all the programs
> we use here in order to simplify installation and administration.

If they're redistributed programs, we would very much appreciate
contribition of the ebuilds.

> Now to install a new program I just have to build it on a node using:
> echo "emerge -b <program>" | qsub
>
> Then I install it on everything else using:
> emerge -K <program> ; pdsh -a emerge -K <program>

Got a pdsh ebuild?

Thanks,
Donnie