Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo [LWN.net]

Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo

Posted Apr 10, 2007 18:35 UTC (Tue) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

Of course not, this is Gentoo. :)

That's not as much a joke as it sounds like. People who are truly interested in implementing high performance systems occupy themselves with writing and running benchmarks and other analysis tools. When they find issues, they document their findings and (hopefully) submit patches to the appropriate software maintainers.

People who just want to play with their compiler switches and talk about the need "to eke out every last bit of performance from hardware" without actually doing the hard work? They run gentoo.

Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo

Posted Apr 10, 2007 19:09 UTC (Tue) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link]

Yeah, I supposed something alike :-)

Basically, I have same concerns over this that Steven expressed below - for serious HPC work, it is more important to choose carefully between all available implementations of low-level libraries (for example, regarding BLAS kernel, between ATLAS, or vendor implementation like Intel Math Kernel Library, or maybe Kazushige Goto's implementation), than to choose over one Linux distribution or another. And, again as Steven stated below, it is much more important, regarding overall efficiency, how the algorithm given is actually parallelized...

Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo

Posted Apr 12, 2007 13:18 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link]

You forgot one thing. They love to spend a day (or more) finding why upgrading a package breaks everything. I guess that's the day saved over a week of intense computing.

It took me 2 years to setup a usable Gentoo box. Only 1/2 hour to break it and another 1/2h to switch to Ubuntu to get a similar system. Not better, not worse, but no more guesses.

Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo

Posted Apr 19, 2007 10:49 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Thanks for this very insightful comment that tells us a lot about managing clusters with gentoo.

Building a High-Performance Cluster with Gentoo

Posted Apr 19, 2007 10:53 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

What you missed is that the article talks about added flexibility when using gentoo. I'd understand people using Scientific Linux/RHEL for their clusters if it actually would mean less administration overhead and more stability, but for most HPC applications (which are very very frickle), it's the opposite. But I guess you'll find some acidly thing to say about that, too.