HPC Oscar Vs Rocks

My colleague recommended me Oscar as a software to install all the packages to make a cluster, I took a look at the site and I found that the packages were old, and on the mailing list there was messages of people having some unsolved problems. However, I thought that probably it was only some guy with bad luck.

Then I read the manual in which I found some in-congruence, but I said not too bad I can avoid them. I installed CentOS 5.4 X86_64 and I have installed Oscar, preparing the repository, and I started to have problems over problems; packages mismatching, conflicts and much more. After a day fixing problems I was able to install the packages and preparing the distribution. And here others problems again, I was not able to install on the nodes. Then I said, (beeeep) enough is enough I was installing Oscar in order to avoid to configure every single package but if I need to spend this amount of time to solve problems, probably it is not the right one!

Then I decided to give a try on Rocks, the site seemed not update (not a good start), however, the DVD image was two weeks old.

I downloaded the DVD, followed the instructions that it was showing during the installation (windows style, next, next, finish) and after 45 minutes my cluster was up and running. And this it was what I was expecting from Oscar.

In my personal opinion, Rocks is the right option, much more support,easy to install, all the major packages that I needed are included. For exemple, openMPI, MPICH2, PVM, Ganglia, SGE and others. I am still learning how to use all the functionalities, but I really think that it is a good one to have.

All this, to try to save some time, to the next one which wants or needs to have an HPC , I will strongly suggest to give a try to Rocks before Oscar.

For the curious ones, I have installed it on 4 DELLs R410 with double processor X6667 with 24GB each, for home made simulations developed in C, C++, Fortran, R, Magma and Maple. (not all full support the multiprocessor environment).

Now back to the GPU 😀

Ps: This is the link for Rocks