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Cake day: January 15th, 2025

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  • a14o@feddit.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlHPC system setup
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    2 months 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.


  • I love NixOS but I wouldn’t commend it to people who are at a point in their sysadmin trajectory where they haven’t heard of Ansible. (It’s not just that Nix has a learning curve, it’s that you’re seriously screwed if you can’t tell the difference between a Nix problem and a regular package / kernel issue.)

    OP, use Ansible.






  • Lenovo ThinkPads work very nicely with Linux, and there’s a large second-hand market. The T and X series are especially great I find.

    The usual advice about avoiding soldered RAM holds in general, but right now used laptops are being bought just for stripping RAM. So I think putting up with soldered RAM in second hand devices (I’d go for at least 32G) can be a smart move because it may be a better deal (and often a smaller form factor).