As some of you know I do quite a bit scientific computing/machine learning for living. I have 5 fairly anemic computing nodes with identical hardware specifications (16 cores + 24 GB of RAM). As a comparison the last computing node I just deployed in the lab has 768 GB of RAM and 4x12 cores. No these machines don't run BSD in production. They run RHEL.
I would like to convert those 5 computing nodes into ROCKS cluster
http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/
I have run ROCKS in the past and it works like a charm. The only reason I am staring to hesitate now is that ROCKS 6.2 is based of CentOS 6.6. Aside of the fact that I use Princeton recompilation of RHEL (Springdale Linux) I am a bit worried about version 6.6. Namely I just deployed two large computing nodes running Springdale 7.1 and as much as I hate systemd I have to concur that system feels much snappier because it is compiled with gcc-4.8.3. Also the libraries finally updated and having things like python 2.7.5 as the part of the base instead of the sandbox is big + for me.
Many of my users like Ubuntu which enable us to run some buggy but cutting edge research grade software. This leads to my question.
Is there an Ubuntu/Debian based alternative to ROCKS cluster distribution? Sun used to have Sun grid machine IIRC but Solaris is no longer usable for scientific computing just like BSDs.