[Beowulf] cluster building advice?

[Christopher Samuel]

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On 17/09/12 07:52, Jeffrey Rossiter wrote:

> I am getting started on a cluster building project at my
> university. We just replaced all of our lab machines so I am going
> to be using the old machines to rebuild our cluster.

I'd suggest that you also want a way to manage the cluster as an
entity, we use xCAT for this and it's open source:

http://xcat.sourceforge.net/

It's got a very active mailing list and active development.

> The intention is for the system to be used for scientific
> computation. I am trying to decide on a linux distribution to use.
> Does it matter all that much?

If you're going to be using commercial codes then you probably want
something that's Red Hat or a rebuild (CentOS or Scientific Linux).

cheers!
Chris
- -- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci

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