Re: [gentoo-cluster] Gentoo vs RedHat cluster

[Justin Bronder]

On 4/13/06, Brady Catherman <bradyc@××××××.edu> wrote:
>
> For our Mac OS run I was able to work with Apple to get performance
> numbers up. Mac OS started much, much slower than Linux and failed to
> scale at all. One of the Apple engineers emailed with several
> recommendations to improve performance. The biggest was to not use
> Mpich 1. Once I compiled against Mpich 2 everything went much faster
> on the Apple side of things.


There's one thing I had better try out then, we were just talking about
potentially upgrading recently and decided against  it as the Myrinet-GM
implementation of Mpich was built against 1.2.6.

Anyways, the Apple run of HPL was compiled against the Accelerate
> framework while the Gentoo side was compiled against the most recent
> Goto libraries (in January 2006). The Apple side was compiled with a
> custom version of GCC 4.0.2 (XCode doesn't come with fortran) and the
> Linux side was compiled with GCC 4.0.2 from Gentoo's ebuild.
>
> I may have made it harder for myself in that I compiled a 64 bit
> kernel and 64 bit platform.
>
> Our setup is XServe G5's 2.3GHz with 4GB of RAM, running form a local
> 80GB SATA hard drive. At the time we just had a simple GigE
> connection between nodes. Not we have a GigE based FNN.


Same basic setup here except the majority of our G5's are 2Ghz with 2G of
RAM.
We used the IBM xlf compiler and Goto's libraries in OS X and development
ATLAS 3.7.11 (development for G5 support), gcc is version 3.4.4 in Gentoo
and Debian.

The Gentoo image is true 64-bit whereas the Debian is 64-bit kernel and
32-bit
userland.  Gentoo ends up with a tiny advantage here so far, but we've only
tested across 8 nodes, so I wouldn't really count the results yet.

Hopefully we'll get our new netbooter up and working soon and I'll run some
more comparisons across a much larger set of nodes.

Thanks,

Justin Bronder
University of Maine
ACRL

with gcc

> What environment was your partner using?
>
>