This article came at an excellent time: I've recently been setting up test deployments of both Puppet and Chef for potential HPC use, and this article confirms

This article came at an excellent time: I've recently been setting up test deployments of both Puppet and Chef for potential HPC use, and this article confirms a lot of my impressions. In particular, that Puppet has much better documentation (especially for doing the initial setup) and a more sysadmin-friendly language, but that Chef makes it easier to carry out complex tasks. Despite some cool things I've been able to do in Chef, Puppet is probably going to end up the winner, if for no other reason than it having much much better support for RHEL and clones (ie Scientific Linux). Chef was extremely unimpressive there in many ways, and anything related to deployment where the wiki includes the line "RPM installation via ELFF has been deprecated" is going to be a non-starter in the HPC world. (Or doesn't, anymore... any mention of RPM seems to have been scrubbed now.) We're probably only going to use it on infrastructure/head nodes though: our compute nodes are provisioned on ramdisk statelessly using Warewulf, and are easier to reconfigure with a reboot/redeploy than via CM. (edit to clarify)