[3dem] Operating system for local server environment

[Christian Tüting]

Dear 3dem mailing list recipients,

I would like to get your opinion on which operating system is the most
suitable for our local server environment.

To frame the question:
We have multiple local workstations and storage servers with a very
heterogeneous architecture:
Different GPUs (2080Ti, 3090), different CPUs (Intel i9, Intel Xeon, AMD
EPYC), sometimes with a cache SSD, sometimes not. Different memory
sizes/types, different hard drive organization, etc.

Currently, Centos 7 is installed on all the machines, but as you might
know, this OS is pretty old and the EOL is just in 2 years. As some of
the workstations needs some maintenance, I would like to not install
Centos 7 again, just to redo this in a couple of months.

Our need for the machines is the following:
cryoSPARC, Scipion3, Relion
AlphaFold, NAMD/Gromacs

For the storage/main node servers, there is no special need. We don't
have any workload balancer like SLURM, and also the storage servers
"just" stores the data, without any special need. Interconnectivity is
established over NFS or sshfs, but these should be possible in any unix
OS.

I personally have experience with [X/K/U]buntu, Centos, and some Arch
Linux, so I am aware of the basic differences (e.g. apt vs yum).

Proposed by cryoSPARC is Ubuntu, at some other point (might be in the
Scipion mailing list), Rocky Linux was proposed. Also, afaik, Scientific
Linux is often used.

As I am used to Centos 7, handling outdated repos (e.g. GCC4 being the
default compiler) is a daily business, I would like to avoid in the
future. I think, this strongly points to Ubuntu, where a big and active
community is present.

Thank you for your feedback :)


Best regards
Christian
Dr. rer. nat. Christian Tüting

Kastritis Laboratory for Biomolecular Research
Cryo-Electron Microscopy & Computational Structural Biology  
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