[3dem] Operating system for local server environment

[Kilian Schnelle]

We are running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on our HPC without any problems so far.

I self had experience with CentOS 7 before but switching to Ubuntu was not that much of a difference for most, I mean mostly you may have to google the corresponding package name since they differ in yum/apt. I choose Ubuntu over Rocky/Alma since I didn’t knew what would “win” and also the support times of Ubuntu LTS versions is great, same as the obvious advantage of having a huge user base.

Cheers
Kilian


Kilian Schnelle
Department of Structural Biology
University of Osnabrueck
Barbarastr. 13
D-49076 Osnabrueck, Germany
Phone: +49 541 969 7508
Email: kilian.schnelle at uni-osnabrueck.de




> On 10. May 2022, at 10:28, Christian Tüting <christian.tueting at biochemtech.uni-halle.de> wrote:
> 
> 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 As I am used to Centos 7, handling outdated repos (e.g. GCC4 being the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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