Ask Slashdot: Best Linux Distro For Computational Cluster?

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 26, 2011 @07:39AM from the what-will-you-be-computationalizing? dept.

DrKnark writes "I am not an IT professional, even so I am one of the more knowledgeable in such matters at my department. We are now planning to build a new cluster (smallish, ~128 cores). The old cluster (built before my time) used Redhat Fedora, and this is also used in the larger centralized clusters around here. As such, most people here have some experience using that. My question is, are there better choices? Why are they better? What would be recommended if we need it to fairly user friendly? It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."

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Re:RHEL by pavon · 2011-05-26 07:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you need something cheaper (no licenses), you can always go CentOS.
If you want something compatible with Red Hat but cheaper, you should go with Scientific Linux, which is the same sort of idea as CentOS, but has more timely releases, and is used by other major clusters, like the ones at Fermilab and CERN.