Re: [gentoo-cluster] Gentoo vs RedHat cluster

[Brady Catherman]

I just converted out 134 node cluster from RedHat Enterprise Linux v4 to Gentoo 2005.1 Before and after the conversion we ran UnixBench as part of the Beowulf Performance Suite. There is a graphical representation of the results here: http://oceanus.ibest.uidaho.edu/~bcatherm/benchmark.png That shows Gentoo and Redhat on x86 hardware, and Gentoo and Macos on an dual XServe G5. And here is the tables: Gentoo_x86% Gentoo_ppc6% MacOS % RedHat_x86% Gentoo_x86 Gentoo_ppc64 MacOS RedHat_x86 Dhrystone 2 using register variables 74.0980112 80.10593524 100 76.91090096 4248495.5 4592966.8 5733616.1 4409775.8 Double-Precision Whetstone 52.82766909 58.5163918 100 65.96781732 791.2 876.4 1497.7 988 Execl Throughput 100 25.90300029 16.30133994 0.680891349 2746.4 711.4 447.7 18.7 File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 100 56.72337653 34.19748972 67.2042237 264034 149769 90293 177442 File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 100 58.5222193 34.24796214 72.20220878 76060 44512 26049 54917 File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 100 61.8005082 21.06610594 60.05659416 574971 355335 121124 345308 Pipe Throughput 100 83.1021079 36.09782829 88.49157048 541614.3 450092.9 195511 479283 Pipe-based Context Switching 100 39.30622691 68.55390149 na 123547.6 48561.9 84696.7 na Process Creation 100 40.99792243 9.929224748 72.82264808 11600.1 4755.8 1151.8 8447.5 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 100 49.33560892 26.2099232 9.216140436 820.3 404.7 215 75.6 System Call Overhead 87.00151942 100 28.1422103 79.61936462 481097 552975.4 155619.5 440275.5 On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:04 PM, Simon-Nicolas Roth wrote: Hi, A small introduction: We currently own 2 small clusters. One with 42 opteron diskless nodes (adelie  gentoo linux) and another one with 24 pentium 4 diskless nodes (based on  Kyron's wiki http://wiki.neuralbs.com/index.php/Gentoo_Diskless_Client). We have seen a nice upgrade in perfomance when we changed the 24 nodes cluster  from Redhat to Gentoo. The question: We are in discussion to make a cluster with around 1024 nodes for parallel  scientific computing. I want to convince that Gentoo would be better on this  cluster than RedHat! Most people around this project don't believe in Gentoo  (obviously because they have never done anything with Gentoo). Does anyone have really solid arguments/articles/proofs about the performance  of Gentoo on clusters to help me convice the RedHat guys? Thanks Simon --  gentoo-cluster@gentoo.org mailing list