[Bioclusters] Operating system choice.

[Chris Dagdigian]

Good news on LSF (I'm not sure about Veritas..)

Platform LSF mostly cares about what version of glibc you are running. I 
helped someone on this list deploy LSF 5.2 on a 100% Gentoo linux 
cluster earlier this year. I think there are Debian LSF users on this 
list as well.  The same rule applies for the next release of LSF -- the 
beta distributions for linux are availible in a few different glibc 
flavors.

I'm going to be trying to get the LSF beta 6.0 products running under 
RH7.3, Fedora Core 1, Gentoo and Debian for various reasons over the 
next few weeks. I'll let you know what problems I run into.

-Chris




David Robillard wrote:

> Good evening everyone,
> 
> I'm in the process of building a compute farm and my main concern is with the Operating System choice.
> 
> As a unix systems admin, I'm not a big fan of Red Hat linux products (or anything RPM based for that matter), because of dependency problems inherent to RPM. I would prefer to go with Debian GNU/Linux or with FreeBSD. Unfortunately, my Upper Management team thinks Linux and Red Hat are identical.
> 
> I thus face two barriers:
> 
> a) The OS needs to be compatible with Platform LSF and Veritas NetBackup client.
> 
> b) I need proper arguments to demonstrate to Upper Management why we should NOT use Red Hat. 
> 
> Therefore, 
> 
> Does anyone have experience with LSF/NetBackup on Debian or FreeBSD?
> 
> Could someone help me put together a "sales pitch" for either Debian or FreeBSD? Otherwise, the OS choice will be a business choice and not a technical/systems administration choice. Hence I'll be "stuck" with it...
> 
> Here are some details or the environment:
> 
> -I have 5+ years experience running Solaris, Debian, FreeBSD and Red Hat machines.
> -This compute farm will be running on x86 architecture, the Intel Xeon CPU.
> -Gigabit ethernet will be used for interconnect, nothing fancy here.
> -Master node will be connected to a SAN and will be backed-up by Veritas NetBackup.
> -Compute nodes will boot via PXE/Etherboot (undecided yet) and mount their kernel via NFS. A local drive will be there for swap.
> -The applications running on this compute farm are in-house algorithms which don't use MPI nor PVM.
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> 
> David
> 
> --
> David Robillard
> UNIX systems administrator
> david.robillard@galileogenomics.com
> +1 514 270 3991 x285
> Galileo Genomics
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-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
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