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Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting
wazza brings us a story about the Philippine government's weather service (PAGASA), which has recently used an eight-PC Debian cluster to replace an SGI supercomputer. The system processes data from local sources and the Global Telecommunication System, and it has reduced monthly operational costs by a factor of 20. Quoting:
"'We tried several Linux flavours, including Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora etc,' said Alan Pineda, head of ICT and flood forecasting at PAGASA. 'It doesn't make a dent in our budget; it's very negligible.' Pineda said PAGASA also wanted to implement a system which is very scalable. All of the equipment used for PICWIN's data gathering comes off-the-shelf, including laptops and mobile phones to transmit weather data such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloud formation and atmospheric pressure from field stations via SMS into PAGASA's central database."
Not sure why you call Debian a desktop distro, it's much more useful as a server.
You obviously doesn't have a clue about Debian. Debian has been a fine server since 1995, and I still choose it before RHEL anyday. I have always found it strange that everyone went for RedHat, when they could have Debian. Mark S. saw the advantages of Debian and based Ubuntu on it, Ubuntu is a server and a desktop distro, based on Debian. It has made more people realize the strength of the Debian approach.
Exactly, My job is running high performance computing clusters. You don't need to put much effort into your cluster distribution at all. As long as it's stable, and gets the job done, why mess with it.
/bin/ls don't matter a bit.
The things I (and my co-workers) put a lot of optimization effort into is the kernel and our apps. You're exactly right.. 99.9% of our CPU cycles go into getting work done, and that 0.1% used by