Hi Christopher, That is indeed a great story of success for the Debian project. Thank you for sharing! I wonder if there is any representative page at gsi.de which would mirror your statement?
Googling for debian on gsi.de comes back with lots of links, including such as http://theory.gsi.de/~tneff/theory/news.html Upgrade to Debian 2.0/Kernel 2.1.125 Thomas Neff: October 16, 1998 providing pieces of evidence to your description ;) but I hoped there could be some good summary somewhere. Cheers, Yarik On Mon, 21 May 2012, Christopher Huhn wrote: > Dear debian-science community, > I'm sorry for this rather long post, but in the spirit of the "Debian at > ESRF" post I'd like to give some information about the Debian-based computing > infrastructure at GSI [1], a German non-profit research lab that runs a heavy > ion accelarator and is part of the Helmholtz association [2]. > We are running a more-or-less Debian-only Linux "farm" with more than 1000 > nodes. We used the Debian distro for our Linux boxes since the last > millennium (maybe 1997?). > We recently put on a 10 000 core compute cluster and 1.5 PB Lustre > storage with Infiniband-only networking running Debian Squeeze and managed by > GridEngine - on top of our existing ~ 5000 CPU core cluster with more than 2 > PB Lustre storage. > Apart from our compute cluster we also provide some hundred desktops, > servers for data acquisition, central IT services (DNS, DHCP, Radius, MTAs, > ...) and collaboration web services (Wikis, Subversion, ...) with Debian. > Our accelerator controls unfortunately moves from VMS to Red Hat for > the shiny care-less all-inclusive support - but at least it's Linux ... > Our Debian installation is actually not particularly "scientific". The big > packages like ROOT and Cernlib are installed from source as our > scientists need dozens of customized versions installed at the same > time and don't really honor (maybe understand?) the merits of proper package > management. > Nevertheless we profit a lot from the 2000+ packages we pull from the > standard Debian repositories for our default desktop installation. > In the high energy physics community we are quite alien as everybody > else uses "Scientific Linux" that has been created by CERN and Fermilab > when Red Hat changed its licensing. At that time we already were happy > with Debian and promoted it as an alternative but unfortunately the big > sites were too scared to make that move (different packaging system, no > commercial support, the usual complaints). > BTW: We currently have an open position in our HPC group [3]. The job offer > is in German only unfortunately m(. Basically the job description covers all > our tasks from high-level configuration management with Chef to fiddling with > broken hardware in case of an urgent emergency (this became more and more > seldom during the years). The new position will probably focus a lot on > monitoring, which did not grow fast enough with the growth of the farm during > the last years. > Please contact me if you have any questions and don't hesitate to send any > applications in English. > Cheers, > Christopher > [1]http://gsi.de/ > [2] http://www.helmholtz.de/en > [3] http://gsi.de/informationen/internal/vw/pa/1920-12.50.html -- Yaroslav O. Halchenko Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
