[R-sig-hpc] simple question on R/Rmpi/snow/slurm configuration

[elijah wright]

> The next chore for me is node maintenance.  Dirk has suggested dsh
> (dancer's shell):
> http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html.en and Moe at LLNL
> has suggested pdsh https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdsh/.  If anyone
> has any additional suggestions, I would love to hear about it.

I'd strongly encourage you to adopt puppet for managing cluster nodes;
you want to be able to "promise" that an up to date cluster node is
just like any of your other cluster nodes - same software installed,
same keys distributed, same permutation of bugs.

It may initially seem like a large investment of time to learn
puppet's configuration language and figure out how to automate many of
your sysadmin processes, but the long-term payoff in reliability and
the decrease in your management overhead will *more than* account for
it.  And let you get back to doing research, or whatever it is what
you need the nodes for.  :-)

--elijah