OS choice for a genomics orientated server?

[jambler]

I am setting up a server at our university to handle the storage and assembly of large genomes, and I am having difficulty deciding which operating system would suite our needs best.
It has to:
Be compatible with a Lustre 1.8 file system
Able to run Gmod and Gbrowse easily and remain stable
Run Galaxy

I have tried Gentoo, Ubuntu, and RHEL, each one has its pro's and cons... some work with Luster, but not so much with Gbrowse, and vice versus.

It is a fairly powerful system, so the question is of compatibility.

Any suggestions will be appreciated
Thanks!

[simonandrews]

If you need official support for lustre then your choice is going to be limited by that. I'd have thought that going with RHEL or a free variant of that like CentOS would be a good choice. To get lustre support you'll have to stick with RHEL5 since 6 isn't officially listed as supported yet, but this should work OK with most things. Gbrowse supports this too and I'm pretty Galaxy would also be fine.

[cement_head]

We use Bio-Linux, which is essentially a wrapper for Ubuntu and it works very nicely for our user base. FYI: there is an upgrade script that will convert Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64 to Bio-Linux:

http://nebclists.nerc.ac.uk/pipermail/bio-linux-dev/2012-September/000135.html

http://nebc.nerc.ac.uk/tools/bio-linux/bio-linux-6.0

I guess if you're looking for full support, use SUSE or RHEL (CentOS). You might eMAIL the company and ask them about Bio-Linux

[simonandrews]

I can second biolinux - if you want a pre-configured environment to run on a workstation then this is probably the easiest way to get up and running. Not everything you might need is there to start with, but lots of things are and the environment is pretty standard so it's easy to add in more packages.

[shambam]

Does anyone have any experience running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server addition? My workstation is Ubuntu, but very soon I will be setting up 2-3 servers for the same reasons as the OP. I'm familiar with Ubuntu which makes it tempting for me to use, but I've been advised to go with CentOS for stability.

It would be good to know if anyone has core servers running Ubuntu LTS, and how stable they are.

[rhinoceros]

Our fancy new cluster runs Rocks release 6.0 (Mamba)

[GenoMax]

You could start with Ubuntu since you are most familiar with it. As long as you properly configure your storage it should be easy enough to switch OS's in the first few months (in case you decide your first OS choice is not stable/does not work).

Just make sure you keep your home/data directories portable so they can be easily unmounted and re-mounted.