Operating Systems
Aspen Systems installs and integrates the latest operating system into your high-performance computational cluster environment. With our design, construction and expertise, we can build your solution exactly to your need, with complete reliability and recoverability. If you’re not sure what OS would be optimal for your needs, our staff can provide the information you need to help you choose the operating system that best fits your requirements.
All of our linux offerings can be deployed in an Intel Cluster Ready configuration to ensure out of the box interoperability and ease of use.
CentOS
The Community ENterprise Operating System (CentOS) is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution is 100% compatible rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution requirements. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible and has an extremely long support cycle of five years. CentOS is for people who need an enterprise class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support. Aspen uses CentOS as its default distribution due to its superior ease of administration, compatibility, reliability, and stability.
Debian GNU/Linux
Debian GNU/Linux is popular for high-performance computing due to its multi-platform support and ease of package management and administration. It provides a wide range of services, with over 26,000 packages to select from with the current distribution. Debian is one of the oldest distributions available, and it was amongst the first to offer its code under the GPL. Debian GNU/Linux is full featured, dynamic and also free to use and redistribute.
Fedora
The Fedora Project is an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a set of project objectives. The Fedora Project was created to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Fedora is a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It provides a public development platform and proving ground for new open source technologies. The project releases new versions of Fedora about 2-3 times a year, with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering teams participate in building Fedora. Most new or added features in Red Hat Enterprise linux comes from the Fedora project. The Fedora Project attempts to invite and encourage more outside participation, to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community. Red Hat Enterprise Linux technology is derived from the Fedora Project. It is best suited as a workstation OS.
Gentoo Linux
The Gentoo Linux distribution includes a rich set of popular software packages and is relatively easy to install and upgrade. Because it is a source distribution, it’s useful for organizations that wish to customize a Linux distribution for their high-performance systems yet maintain an easy install and upgrade ability. The portage system, a derivative of the BSD ports system, is a powerful package management system. Since Gentoo is a source distribution, new packages are compiled from source to ensure optimal performance on your hardware. Gentoo is also very reliable and easily maintained.
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 HPC Edition
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 HPC Edition is the latest version of the Windows Server platform. It provides enhanced security, increased reliability, and simplified administration to help enterprise customers across all industries. The Microsoft Windows Server 2008 family helps organizations do more with less by providing an infrastructure for higher productivity and efficiency. Windows Server 2008 may be the best choice for a first cluster, especially if you are unfamiliar with linux. Aspen uses this distribution to support software that is only available on the Windows platform such as Floworks and Solidworks.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat's enterprise-class Linux (RHEL) operating system distribution is backed by the accountability of a major commercial software company and is stable, reliable and broadly supported. Easy to deploy and manage, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also provides various training and support options along with many industry and hardware certifications and certified applications. High-performance computing customers realize increased manageability with Red Hat Network and improved scalability with Red Hat Global File System. RHEL has the most widely adopted application support and is considered to be an extremely stable distribution suitable for high availability applications.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/
Novell SUSE Linux
The Novell SUSE LINUX family is characterized by flexibility and versatility while delivering a scalable, high-performance foundation for secure enterprise computing. It delivers a degree of security, reliability, availability, scalability, and automated administration that only Linux-based systems can offer. SUSE supports its enterprise customers with a comprehensive range of qualified consulting, training and support services. Next to RHEL, it is one of the most widely deployed distributions in use today. It has known compatibility with many Novell applications.
http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/
Rocks
Rocks is an open-source Linux cluster distribution that enables end users to easily build computational clusters, grid endpoints and visualization tiled-display walls. Hundreds of researchers from around the world have used Rocks to deploy their own cluster. With its role based package manager, deploying applications across the entire cluster is very easy and efficient.
