Arch Linux

SiC

Member

From: Liverpool, England

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 430

Production Servers & Computation Clusters

Hi,

Hopefully, within the next year, I will be involved in building, configuring and maintaining a distributed processing cluster. It will be used to perform clustering and statistical analysis on large data sets.  At the moment it is in the pipeline, but none of the software has been adapted for use on it yet, and nor have the hardware requirements been decided upon, let alone the decision to purchase been made.  The actual cluster won't be particularly large, probably around 10 nodes, but it has set me thinking.

The core installation of Archlinux is particularly well suited as a base for use in the individual nodes, as well as for building a set of tools to manage it; and although it is likely at the moment that computing services will want to work with something different when they are brought in to help set it up, given their existing experience of RHEL, I am intrigued as to whether anyone in the Arch community has any experience with this, or even better if they have used Arch in a similar environment.

The other side to this question is, aside from the Arch site itself, who is using Arch in a production environment, how have you configured this environment, and what sort of load does it hold under?

Given these questions, and the specificity of them, I have setup a new forum, based at http://www.simonchambers.org/forums/ and am inviting anyone who has any interest in these areas to join, and discuss them.  I set them up primarily because I didn't want to clog this forum up with this topic.

One of the ideas behind creating a new forum, was also to allow people to discuss the issues related to running a production server, contribute ideas about what people in the community want out of a server, and finally, to take these ideas and build a meta-distribution based around them, similar in vein to the Larch project.

Please feel free to comment, flames are also appreciated Of course, if you want to head over and post etc, please do.  At the moment, my forum is feeling a little unloved, there being only one member

Si