Hello, I will soon have to setup a small GPU HPC cluster with few servers. It is not something I have ever done, I did setup servers and manage them but not sometof this scale with several users.

I’ve been looking at plausible alternatives and I am looking at openhpc, Ansible and NixOs.

Out of the three I feel like NixOs could be a good choice to have the configuration clearly stored somewhere. I won’t be actively maintaining the cluster at all times and find it nice that if someone needs some software I can point them to the configuration and tell them to modify it and then just update the system.

On the other hand I appreciate how openhpc is designed for that and definitely does support all use cases we need.

Ansible seems like an in between option.

Do you have advice on this choice? I read that NixOs can have problems with cuda drivers and custom compiled software, which would definitely be a deal breaker.

I found some HPC do use NixOs but it is definitely not a widespread option. Thus I’m a bit afraid I won’t be easily able to find solutions to problems I may encounter.

  • a14o@feddit.org
    5·
    1 day ago

    I have no experience with HPC clusters, just dropping in to contribute my opinions on the NixOS stuff.

    I won’t be actively maintaining the cluster at all times and find it nice that if someone needs some software I can point them to the configuration and tell them to modify it and then just update the system.

    This sounds good in theory, but in practice few people will have the know-how or patience to make changes to your config.

    I read that NixOs can have problems with cuda drivers and custom compiled software, which would definitely be a deal breaker.

    NixOS is very flexible and you can certainly bake custom compiled software into the builds, but expect a steep learning curve.