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I want to create a beowulf cluster using Ubuntu 18. Looking at some guides they all seem to use ubuntu server for this an my question is why? Is it not possible to use ubuntu desktop for the client nodes or is it more for a performance purpose? The same question for the cluster server. Should it not use ubuntu desktop? Are you always expected to use the comman line with these kind of clusters?

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I don't see, why you couldn't use any of the two to build the cluster. Though having no GUI can increase performance, since there is no computation time used for creating the working GUI. Note, that both versions can be used with or without GUI. The desktop version has the GUI installed and activated by default.

Are you always expected to use the command line with these kind of clusters?

Yes, mostly you are expected to use the command line, at least for setting up the cluster. Some cluster software might have external GUI programs, that run on a computer outside of the cluster and use an IP connection (for example a REST API) to connect to the cluster. Or the cluster software might include a web frontend.

You should keep in mind, that often there can be good reasons to not have a GUI. If the cluster is installed on bare metal machines in a datacenter, you cannot simply go to the physical machine and attach display, keyboard and mouse to it. Or you don't want to only keep these things near the cluster for the maybe rare case, that you directly need to access the cluster machines. In all these cases SSH connections are way more standard.


So, all in all, with Ubuntu Server you don't have the GUI running, which you don't need in most cases anyway and which saves you a bit of performance. You need to set up the cluster at the commandline anyway, so you can directly to this via SSH without GUI.

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