Re: [gentoo-cluster] examples of (large) Gentoo clusters

[Hanni Ali]

Hi Bryan,

I run a start up which provides Gentoo based clusters for a wide variety of
applications. I find it far simpler to maintain and run Gentoo, portage
simplifies maintenance so much.

The cluster will be a "hyperwall", meaning that each node
> > will have graphics, forming a grid of displays for multi-parameter,
> > multi-dimensional scientific visualization.


Sounds fascinating I  do hope you will report how it goes and what method
you use to achieve this.

the nodes will also be used for compute
> > jobs (scientific), and may serve as a testbed for a production
> scientific
> > computing environment.


In my experience MPI works very well on Gentoo.

> I'd be grateful for any feedback I get from others on the list about the
> > clusters they maintain or use, and perhaps some comments about the
> efficacy
> > of Gentoo in an environment where stability is very important, and how
> > system administration compares to administration of a Suse or Redhat
> cluster.
>

I always find sys admin far easier with Gentoo, but wrt clusters I think
architecture of the cluster is as important as the OS, I always recommend
diskless although local disks for replication etc. are fine, but by keeping
the important parts centrally and providing an image for the nodes to boot
the chance of stray mistakes is reduced. This also allows you to improve
stability by testing a new image on one node before deploying across the
cluster.

KlustOS (our OS) which is Gentoo based has been designed to scale to
hundreds if not thousands of nodes and I believe Gentoo is more than capable
of running large production clusters stably. Donnie's advice about security
updates in combination with a testing image is useful as well.

Hanni

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