[Beowulf] Gentoo in the HPC environment

[Christopher Samuel]

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On 26/06/14 05:08, Kilian Cavalotti wrote:

> You can just use a very minimal OS on your compute nodes, then
> compile and install all the user facing bits in a shared location.
> You hand an environment modules system to the users and off they
> go.

That's pretty much exactly what I've done for the last 8 years or so,
and it works really well.

Our current incarnation is to netboot a minimal RHEL image on diskless
nodes (managed via xCAT) and then all the applications are in
/usr/local including various Perl, Python and R versions with their
associated module hell.  At the moment we've got about 638 different
modules across 3 different architectures.

The main reason for RHEL on compute nodes is to keep hardware support
people happy, most vendors take the Blue Brothers approach to Linux
("we support both kinds of Linux, RHEL *and* SLES").

We only have a handful of commercial applications, but we've never had
an issue with what they support in terms of OS.

All the best,
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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