infrastructure VS ohpc

Rocky Linux is a fine successor to CentOS and was created by the original founder of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer.

https://rockylinux.org/

https://rockylinux.org/about/

If you need enterprise support RHEL tends to be a default choice.

If you cannot afford RHEL or do not need enterprise support, Rocky Linux fills the role that CentOS once did.

Also you can use Rocky Linux, it's very close! https://rockylinux.org/

Arch Linux is pretty solid on my end, gnome is a little buggy, nothing like fedora but if you're like my mother and don't want to set anything up I get it. There is Rocky linux if you want a RHEL experience and don't need the latest packages. I don't like Ubuntu but you could go that route.

If you run into anny problems ask chat gpt. https://rockylinux.org/

If If you feel more comfortable on a RHEL based distro, there a good alternatives to CentOS such as AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.

This situation still exists and Gregory Kurtzer's RockyLinux (Greg started CentOS originally), CloudLinux's AlmaLinux, and others exist to fill the need for a freely installable RHEL clone.

https://rockylinux.org/ :

Rocky Linux is an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. It is under intensive development by the community.

We have plenty of licensed RHEL, but in isolated environments the hurdle of connecting to a Satellite server or their subscription hub on the internet is too high -- at least with Rocky and the ilk available. For this set up, the licensing model doesn't match reality, at least not easily.

Are we really going to build out compatible configuration management, monitoring, logging, etc? -- it's not a seamless transition. How much time do we have to put towards this?

And yes -- there is software compatibility issues. Look at the OpenHPC software distribution, it's designed for SUSE or Enterprise Linux: https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/2.X

I recommend you just stick with HPC centric tools are workflows. Your scientists aren’t going to learn k8s as you said. SLURM is the scheduler you want and if you’re new to HPC, I recommend taking a look at https://openhpc.community

the general consensus is that pam_slurm_adopt is the better module (that's just one dude's opinion but his citations are good) - the advantage is that not only will it gatekeep SSH access, it'll also drop their SSH session into the cgroups that are constraining the user's resource limits, which also means their CPU usage will show up in sacct for the job (if the user has multiple jobs running on a node their ssh session may get dropped into the wrong one, no help for that)

Check this: https://openhpc.community/ (this helped me a lot when I started. I'm no longer the admin of such systems)

Overall, if you're already in a RedHat-based environment, an installation of OpenHPC is pretty straightforward. Their reference implementation assumes you have a head node for the scheduler that all other nodes NAT through, but that's not a 100% requirement as much as a common setup. It also assumes you can reformat the compute nodes and dedicate them to HPC work, so if you need to keep the systems available as normal workstations, you'll need to deviate a bit. You could also use the OpenHPC instructions as a guide for what packages to install, but it may take longer to get everything right.

https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/1.3.X Newer versions of OpenHPC don't seem to releasing XCat guides anymore unfortunately.