Distributions for Scientific Computing

rhaynes74

Does anyone know of distributions which excel for those of working in fields involve scientific/mathematical computing - ie. preconfigured with all the compilers (almost all distributions would have this of course), numerical libraries, graphics visualization tools, mpi, etc. ??

Thanks,

R Haynes

marc

Well, I'm not expert but as a reference I would tell you that the MareNostrum (a supercomputer at my University) runs Suse linux...

Goineasy9

Did you look at Scientific Linux?

http://distrowatch.com/index.php?distribution=scientific&month=June&year=2010

woboyle

What GoinEasy9 said, try Scientific Linux. It is a RHEL derived distribution maintained by the high energy physics community and is widely used world-wide for scientific research, data acquisition, data analysis, and just general use. My wife even uses it on her Toshiba netbook computer (she is a particle physicist at a major accelerator lab).

altNull

What are you trying to do? Single desktop? Server? Cloud? If you are looking into doing FLOPs then you should look at what this Professor did with just a few PS3s and Linux. Or, password crackers use Linux on a single gaming machine while running SLIed graphics cards for the GPUs (ref:Using multiple graphics cards as a general purpose parallel computer: applications to computer vision by Fung, J. Mann) I saw it at Defcon cracking away, damn thing was so fast. Its a Black Hats wet dream!