[3dem] Operating system for local server environment

[Matthias Wolf]

Hi Christian,

We like Alma Linux as a replacement for CentOS. It's essentially identical to CentOS 8 and the GUI is even nicer. I had no problems with nvidia drivers (just needs the usual nouveau driver deactivation). We are now running it on a 2 workstations and a GPU server with 7 GPUs. Will switch over all our other workstations eventually. 

I didn't find Rocky as nice. Never really liked Ubuntu that much. Fedora gets updated too often, IMO.

Best,
   Matthias

-----Original Message-----
From: 3dem On Behalf Of Christian Tüting
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2022 5:29 PM
To: 3dem at ncmir.ucsd.edu
Subject: [3dem] Operating system for local server environment

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As I am used to Centos 7, handling outdated repos (e.g. GCC4 being the default compiler) is a daily business, I would like to avoid in the future.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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