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 -- E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mobile: 07985580147 Website: www.ainkaboot.co.uk
