[Bioclusters] Operating system choice.

[Ron Chen]

A paper about using FreeBSD boxes in HPC/compute farm
environment:

http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/

Also, not sure if you have heard of GridEngine (SGE)
or not? It is a reliable batch system; it's free and
opensource, but on the other hand you can get support
from Sun or many other 3rd party companies.
(http://wwws.sun.com/software/gridware/partners/index.html)

It supports almost every operating system in the
world, from Cray and NEC supercomputers, to the
smaller guys like Linux, BSDs, and MacOSX.

The FreeBSD port was done by a FreeBSD committer, you
can get the patches there:
http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/sge/

SGE homepage:
http://gridengine.sunsource.net

 -Ron


--- 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
> _______________________________________________
> Bioclusters maillist  - 
> Bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
>
https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters


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