Greetings. I am the senior system administrator at Vanderbilt University's supercomputing center. We operate a 1500 processor cluster for researchers at Vanderbilt.
Our current cluster is divided between 840 Intel/AMD x86 processors, and 672 IBM PowerPC 970FX processors. To date, we have required different operating systems on each architecture because of poor OS support for the PowerPC's. SuSE has been our only option so far. Etch supports PowerPC's running in 64-bit mode, so I was eager to try it on our cluster several months ago. I uncovered a small bug in the installer (the AMD 74xx driver was not compiled in the debian-installer kernel) which prevented me from installing Debian, and reported it to the PowerPC list in September 2006. I was promised that the driver would be included shortly. Unfortunately, some sort of personal issues between developers in the PowerPC group and the debian-installer group has prevented this minor fix from occuring. I do not understand what that problem *is*, only that personal problems are getting in the way of real-world results. I had hoped to be able to install Debian on our cluster during our refresh this spring in order to have a consistent OS across all architectures. Since I have not been able to get this minor bug resolved in three months, we will be installing Centos 5 instead. I have personally been using Debian since slink, and I would like to believe that Debian can sort these issues out before it becomes a permanent handicap to the organization. Finally, I would like to extend thanks to Sven Luthor for tracking down the bug and trying to get me some assistance. Mathew Binkley References: http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2006/09/msg00340.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2006/10/msg00094.html http://www.accre.vanderbilt.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
