Hi, Jonathan. I would make a strong argument against Gentoo. I would recommend that you choose Red Hat or its binary-compatible derivatives, like CentOS.
At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish. In an HPC environment, that should be a customer-facing service that is reliable and well supported. You do not want to be constantly patching, compiling or changing APIs out from underneath of research code. Enterprise Linux provides a stable base for HPC application development with a very solid lifecycle. https://access.redhat.com/site/support/policy/updates/errata/ Being part of a larger community, running the same builds, has its advantages. You won't be the only person encountering a weird stability or performance bug. You also get vendor hardware support, which is huge. I know the counter arguments here. There is always going to be the coder that wants Ubuntu and this-month's release of $LANGUAGE, like on their vagrant box. I have found the Software Collections to be a fantastic solution to this demand. You get the stability of an enterprise OS, plus the latest language features for developers. This, along with environment modules, is win-win. http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/SCL Even if you are a one-man shop, ask yourself what you want to be doing. Do you want to be a systems programmer, or do you want to be a research application developer. Your time is precious. Choose wisely. Cheers. On Tue 06/24/14 08:43AM +0200, Jonathan Aquilina wrote: > Hey guys, > > I am just curious as I have recently switched to Gentoo for every day use > due to its customizability and how everything is compiled for a particular > system. Has anyone used Gentoo in an HPC application? > > Regards, > Jonathan > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf -- Gavin W. Burris Senior Project Leader for Research Computing The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
