Hi,

Here at our department we are going to build a cluster from scratch. We bought 2 new Dell PowerEdge 1800 SATA servers. We still have a bunch of other xeons standing here. And all will be linked together into a cluster. The question I was wondering about is the following. Which linux distro would be the best and most stable one to put on it? We don't want to build from scratch because most pcs have different mobo or architecture and hardware and thus it would cost to much time to configure them properly.

RH9 is stable as I presume but old, FC3 on the other hand is OK but then we have had our bunch of trouble with that because they suddenly hang and only hard reboot is the solution (I think it is the fault of the ATI graphical card). We haven't tried FC4beta yet
FC2 is stable but we had some HD crashes with those.
Mandrake 9/10.0/10.1 never gave a problem. Mandriva 2005 is also fine (but it anly has a stupid name)

But we are also open for other distros.

The program we would use is openpbs. Is this a good idea according to you, or are there better programs for clusters?

Thanks in advance

hmm
i just want to say the following:

the best os for cluster i know is sun microsystems solaris, actually in version 10.
never used linux for clusters.

greets,

Gabriel

hi


got a hint for u.


if you want a up to date enterprise version on RHEL goto

www.centos.org

its essentially RHEL but without the Red hat !! and support of course!!


regards

cmont