Dear Debian webmasters,

would you be so kind to add another entry to the Debian users list:

1. GSI Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany
Sorry for the long official title. Fell free to change it to GSI, Darmstadt, Germany
2. non-profit
3. http://gsi.de/
4.  shorten if required:

"GSI is a German non-profit research lab that runs a heavy ion accelerator
and is part of the Helmholtz association.

The HPC department of GSI is running a Linux "farm" with more than 1000 nodes.
We primarily use Debian for our Linux installation since the last millennium
(ca. 1997).

We have recently put on a 10 000 core compute cluster and 1.5 PB Lustre storage
with Infiniband-only networking running Debian Squeeze and managed by GridEngine
- on top of our existing ~ 5000 CPU core cluster with more than 2 PB Lustre
storage.

Apart from our compute cluster we also provide some hundred desktops,
servers for data acquisition, central IT services and collaboration
web services with Debian.

We profit a lot from the more than 2000 packages that we can simply pull from
the standard Debian repositories for our default desktop installation."


I'm sorry we did not request an entry on the Debian users list during the last
decade.


Cheers,
        Christopher


-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Debian at GSI
Date:   Mon, 21 May 2012 14:05:06 +0200
From:   Christopher Huhn <c.h...@gsi.de>
Organization:   GSI
To:     <debian-scie...@lists.debian.org>



Dear debian-science community,

I'm sorry for this rather long post, but in the spirit of the "Debian at ESRF" 
post I'd like to give some information about the Debian-based computing infrastructure at 
GSI [1], a German non-profit research lab that runs a heavy ion accelarator and is part 
of the Helmholtz association [2].

We are running a more-or-less Debian-only Linux "farm" with more than 1000 
nodes. We used the Debian distro for our Linux boxes since the last millennium (maybe 
1997?).

We recently put on a 10 000 core compute cluster and 1.5 PB Lustre
storage with Infiniband-only networking running Debian Squeeze and managed by 
GridEngine - on top of our existing ~ 5000 CPU core cluster with more than 2 PB 
Lustre storage.

Apart from our compute cluster we also provide some hundred desktops,
servers for data acquisition, central IT services (DNS, DHCP, Radius, MTAs, 
...) and collaboration web services (Wikis, Subversion, ...) with Debian.

Our accelerator controls unfortunately moves from VMS to Red Hat for
the shiny care-less all-inclusive support - but at least it's Linux ...

Our Debian installation is actually not particularly "scientific". The big
packages like ROOT and Cernlib are installed from source as our
scientists need dozens of customized versions installed at the same
time and don't really honor (maybe understand?) the merits of proper package
management.

Nevertheless we profit a lot from the 2000+ packages we pull from the
standard Debian repositories for our default desktop installation.

In the high energy physics community we are quite alien as everybody
else uses "Scientific Linux" that has been created by CERN and Fermilab
when Red Hat changed its licensing. At that time we already were happy
with Debian and promoted it as an alternative but unfortunately the big
sites were too scared to make that move (different packaging system, no
commercial support, the usual complaints).

BTW: We currently have an open position in our HPC group [3]. The job offer is 
in German only unfortunately m(. Basically the job description covers all our 
tasks from high-level configuration management with Chef to fiddling with 
broken hardware in case of an urgent emergency (this became more and more 
seldom during the years). The new position will probably focus a lot on 
monitoring, which did not grow fast enough with the growth of the farm during 
the last years.
Please contact me if you have any questions and don't hesitate to send any 
applications in English.

Cheers,
        Christopher


[1]http://gsi.de/
[2] http://www.helmholtz.de/en
[3] http://gsi.de/informationen/internal/vw/pa/1920-12.50.html

--
Christopher Huhn
Linux therapist

GSI Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung GmbH
Planckstr. 1
64291 Darmstadt
http://www.gsi.de/

Gesellschaft mit beschraenkter Haftung

Sitz der Gesellschaft / Registered Office:                    Darmstadt
Handelsregister       / Commercial Register:
                                         Amtsgericht Darmstadt, HRB 1528

Geschaeftsfuehrung    / Managing Directors:
                                  Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Horst Stoecker,
                                                    Dr. Hartmut Eickhoff
Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrates / Supervisory Board Chair:
                                            Dr. Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph
Stellvertreter        / Deputy Chair:                 Dr. Rolf Bernhard




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