[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Tomislav Maric]

Hi everyone,

I've finally gathered all the hardware I need for my home beowulf. I'm
thinking of setting up RAID 5 for the /home partition (that's where my
simulation data will be and RAID 1 for the system / partitions without
the /boot.

1) Does this sound reasonable?
2) I want to put the /home at the beginning of the disks go get faster
write/seek speeds, if the partitions are the same, software RAID doesn't
care where they are?
3) I'll leave the /boot partition on one of the 3 disks and it will NOT
be included in the RAID array, is this ok?
4) I've read about setting up parallel swaping via priority given to
swap partitions in fstab, but also how it would be ok to create RAID 1
array of swap partitions for the HA of the cluster. What should I choose?

I've gone through all the software raid how-tos, FAQs and similar, but
they are not quite new (date at least 3 years) and there's no reference
to clusters. Any pointers regarding this?

Thank you in advance,
Tomislav

I'm starting with this:

3 x Asus P5Q-VM motherboards
2 x Intel Quad Core Q8200 2.33GHz (2 nodes with 4 cores)
1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 2.6GHz (master node)
3 x Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA 2 HDDs

gigabyte Eth switch with 8 ports .... etc ...

Best regards,
Tomislav