[ltp] Re: Preferred distro for Thinkpads?

[Daniel Pittman]

James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Besides, how many hours of CPU time do you have to save on running your
>> optimized code before you make up for the time wasted compiling it all? ;)
>
> I suspect such optimization would be useful on a large cluster, where
> you've got lots of systems, that you're trying to squeeze out the last
> bit of performance.  Beyond that, I also doubt the value.

Not for any of the cluster people I have worked with, or spoken to about
this.  For them the core OS is really just there to support running
client applications, and the less work (and CPU time) it takes them, the
happier they are.

Client applications are custom code, and often end up carefully
compiled, or even touched with assembly or custom MPI code, to get the
last ounce of performance out of them.

They run almost entirely in the client code, though, and don't tend to
touch the libraries for the most part.


Personally, the only reason I would choose Gentoo is the ability to set
fairly fine-grained compile time options for all packages.  That is
about the only thing that Debian, or RedHat, or whoever don't provide,
so far as I can tell.

   Daniel