Bryan Green wrote:
Hello all,I am looking for something of a survey of examples of Gentoo-driven clusters out there. If such a survey has been done, perhaps someone point me to it.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/cluster/#doc_chap2
But I would like to hear from others on the list about their clusters. I am in the process of advocating for using Gentoo on a new cluster that we will be building. 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. There will also be several disk servers which will run Suse in order to get Lustre support (Lustre support on the client side will be OS-neutral when the current beta is officially released). In addition to graphics, the nodes will also be used for compute jobs (scientific), and may serve as a testbed for a production scientific computing environment.
Joel Martin has previously posted Lustre ebuilds to the list (for both client and server, I thinkg). You may be interested. We'll want to get them into portage at some point, so there's no requirement that you use Suse server-side.
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.
The main difference is that, since we're "live," you need to consider how you want to deal with upgrades. You may wish to pick a static portage tree, import it into some sort of version control, and selectively import changes you want (probably just security bumps, which you can find using the wonderful glsa-check tool from gentoolkit).
I've got a glsa-check wrapper that I use to make things a little easier, which shows and optionally applies applicable updates. I attached it.
Thanks, Donnie
glsa-apply.sh
Description: application/shellscript
