12 ms·

What exactly are the "obvious" reasons (to you/your office) to use CentOS?

bayindirh 6y ago
I'm an HPC administrator. Scientific computation and HPC ecosystem is built upon RedHat infrastructure. First ScientificLinux, then CentOS. To be able to run scientific software and project related middleware with ease, you need a RH-Style distro. That distro is CentOS. (a little more insight is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349371)
- stephenr 6y ago
  ... What do you mean by "RedHat Infrastructure"? What kind of packages are available for RHEL but not for say, Debian?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Nothing sinister. It's not about availability of packages. It's more like people develop and verify on RedHat based distros (because ScientificLinux was RedHat based). Some examples: - Software is released RPM first. - Software certification done on RedHat and CentOS (compile / verification). - Library versions present in RedHat and CentOS are used in development. - Documentation is written RedHat first. You can do everything on Debian. Possibly something would be hardcoded and you need to work around or re-compile it. Or, it works without hiccup but, developers can't provide support since they didn't test on Debian. Scientific software is a very different beast. Its accuracy and precision sometimes depend on the mood of a newborn butterfly in Zanzibar. I develop such software so, I know a little bit about the peculiarities. Since RedHat also has paid support, RH based distributions are considered more sound and mature, because if something breaks, RedHat can fix. It's no different for Debian but, RedHat was able to fly an engineer for NEC Corp. to reproduce and fix a GCC bug on-site. System in question was Itanium based IIRC.
  - _jal 6y ago
    That isn't it, it is just that tools are built for RH-flavors first, and used on RH-flabored distros. I'm sure you can get this stuff working on Debian. I'm also sure it is much more of a PITA to do so, just because that's not where the eyeballs are.
- jabl 6y ago
  I also work in HPC, and our current cluster runs Ubuntu. We're a bit of an outlier though, as you say CentOS is the most common platform. A lot of the ML/DL stuff is developed on Ubuntu first, causing occasional headaches when deploying on CentOS, similar to traditional HPC except the other way around. Oh well.. As ML gets more popular, and now this, maybe there's a chance of breaking the RHEL (rebuild) monopoly in HPC.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Oh, hi! It's interesting to see clusters running on different operating systems. Seeing Ubuntu on the scene is nice. From what can we see, our users can run their ML/DL loads relatively effortlessly on CentOS for some time. Moreover, with GPU support on Docker, we guess that people will migrate to containers to run their loads so distribution will become irrelevant in the future. Do you use IB on your nodes? If yes, is it easy to deploy the kernel modules?
    - jabl 6y ago
      > From what can we see, our users can run their ML/DL loads relatively effortlessly on CentOS for some time. Yes, containers are a god-send for those apps that require some specific version of a specific distro. > Do you use IB on your nodes? If yes, is it easy to deploy the kernel modules? Yes, we do. We use Mellanox OFED, which supports Ubuntu, so it's no more difficult than on CentOS. Perhaps even slightly easier, since minor Ubuntu version updates don't break the kernel internal ABI's so there's no need to wait for all your out-of-tree kernel stuff (MOFED, Lustre, whatnot) to be updated before you can upgrade.

I'm an HPC administrator. Scientific computation and HPC ecosystem is built upon RedHat infrastructure. First ScientificLinux, then CentOS. To be able to run scientific software and project related middleware with ease, you need a RH-Style distro. That distro is CentOS. (a little more insight is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349371)

stephenr 6y ago
... What do you mean by "RedHat Infrastructure"? What kind of packages are available for RHEL but not for say, Debian?
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Nothing sinister. It's not about availability of packages. It's more like people develop and verify on RedHat based distros (because ScientificLinux was RedHat based). Some examples: - Software is released RPM first. - Software certification done on RedHat and CentOS (compile / verification). - Library versions present in RedHat and CentOS are used in development. - Documentation is written RedHat first. You can do everything on Debian. Possibly something would be hardcoded and you need to work around or re-compile it. Or, it works without hiccup but, developers can't provide support since they didn't test on Debian. Scientific software is a very different beast. Its accuracy and precision sometimes depend on the mood of a newborn butterfly in Zanzibar. I develop such software so, I know a little bit about the peculiarities. Since RedHat also has paid support, RH based distributions are considered more sound and mature, because if something breaks, RedHat can fix. It's no different for Debian but, RedHat was able to fly an engineer for NEC Corp. to reproduce and fix a GCC bug on-site. System in question was Itanium based IIRC.
- _jal 6y ago
  That isn't it, it is just that tools are built for RH-flavors first, and used on RH-flabored distros. I'm sure you can get this stuff working on Debian. I'm also sure it is much more of a PITA to do so, just because that's not where the eyeballs are.
jabl 6y ago
I also work in HPC, and our current cluster runs Ubuntu. We're a bit of an outlier though, as you say CentOS is the most common platform. A lot of the ML/DL stuff is developed on Ubuntu first, causing occasional headaches when deploying on CentOS, similar to traditional HPC except the other way around. Oh well.. As ML gets more popular, and now this, maybe there's a chance of breaking the RHEL (rebuild) monopoly in HPC.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Oh, hi! It's interesting to see clusters running on different operating systems. Seeing Ubuntu on the scene is nice. From what can we see, our users can run their ML/DL loads relatively effortlessly on CentOS for some time. Moreover, with GPU support on Docker, we guess that people will migrate to containers to run their loads so distribution will become irrelevant in the future. Do you use IB on your nodes? If yes, is it easy to deploy the kernel modules?
  - jabl 6y ago
    > From what can we see, our users can run their ML/DL loads relatively effortlessly on CentOS for some time. Yes, containers are a god-send for those apps that require some specific version of a specific distro. > Do you use IB on your nodes? If yes, is it easy to deploy the kernel modules? Yes, we do. We use Mellanox OFED, which supports Ubuntu, so it's no more difficult than on CentOS. Perhaps even slightly easier, since minor Ubuntu version updates don't break the kernel internal ABI's so there's no need to wait for all your out-of-tree kernel stuff (MOFED, Lustre, whatnot) to be updated before you can upgrade.