[Beowulf] FreeBSD 6.1 and single system image

[John Hearns]

Glen Gardner wrote:

>I've recently installed FreeBSD 6.1 on a 12 node diskless cluster.
>
>I've got a couple of observations to share for those who might be
>interested...
>
>
>The remarkable thing I notice about the FreeBSD setup is that with all
>nodes booting the same image (including the head node), system
>maintenance is really simple. It also makes me think that a single
>system image using freeware operating systems is a worthy and practical
>goal with FreeBSD, but that Fedora Core is not even close to being an
>out of the
>  
>
I agree re. the single system image. Our clusters work that way, and you 
have the choice of running in a ramdisk mode
as you have done, or using the local disk for tmp/swap, or a 
conventional hard drive install.

Fedora isn't the only kid on the block, and given the short support 
lifetime I would recommend against using it in a cluster.
Fedora is clearly aimed and billed as a cutting edge distro, which will 
have a release every six months.
Most of our clusters have SuSE linux installed, which runs very well on 
Opteron/EMT64.
Our commercial customers tend to go for Redhat Enterprise or SuSE SLES, 
for compatibility and support of ISV codes.