[clug] Request for Ideas/Suggestions: Fedora Scientific Spin

[Robin Humble]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2011 at 09:31:20PM +1000, Andrew Janke wrote:
>On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 21:16, Brad Hards <bradh at frogmouth.net> wrote:
>> On Sunday 03 July 2011 13:31:45 Amit Saha wrote:
>>> It would be of great help if the interested ones among you suggest some
>>> generic tools for numerical computing/scientific research..
>
>I know I'm late to the party but my (humble) suggestion is that you
>dump Fedora and use something Debian based, there is already so much
>more effort on the Debian front in this area that the RH based stuff
>pales into obsecurity.

for only partly sensible reasons, ISV codes generally only support RHEL
and SLES, so big science machines have no real option but to run those.
so it's interesting to me to have fedora have greater science focus so
that it'll flow on into rhel and help the bulk of big numerical science
out there.

so +1 for a fedora spin.

I'm not trying to start a discussion on this (or a distro flame war) but
if I had to guess, I'd say centos/sl/rhel are on 90% of linux clusters,
with most of the rest sles, and maybe only 1 to 2% running a debian
variant.
although I like fedora/rhel, I don't think this is necessarily a sane
situation. it would be good to see more ISV's support debian and
j.random.linux in general as there isn't that much difference between
them all really - ultimately the ISVs are just being lazy.

the plus side is that there's not a whole lot of flow-on effect from
clusters to desktops, so everything has a fair crack there - ubuntu,
debian, fedora, osx, ... some science disciplines are even quite
windows focused. ugh. apple laptops seem to do exceptionally well in
academia actually, but I digress...

>LDAP/NIS for authentication, NFS for cross mounting home directories,
>perhaps a private local subnet? etc etc.  Think of it as a "cluster in
>box".

projects like oneSIS (which we run our clusters with), and also OSCAR
and ROCKS fill this niche. I'd suggest that oneSIS might be the only
one you could include in a distro/spin - the others are more general
and newbie focused than oneSIS and are more like a whole
install/provisioning/updating/versioning system to themselves.
  http://onesis.org
  http://www.rocksclusters.org
  http://oscar.openclustergroup.org

cheers,
robin