Best file system strategy

[Phil Carns]

> We just received our 8-node cluster and I am trying to set everything up. 
> 
> 	Each node has:
> 
> 			2-550 MHz Pentium II
> 			256Mb Ram
> 			1-18Gb U2 SCSI 
> 
> Node 1 serves as the head node. 
> 
> I want to get the group's knowledgable advice on how to set up the 
> user space (/home). There are nice size drives on each node, but how do 
> I access them? I already have a roughly 12Gb /home partition on each 
> Here are the options that I am looking at...
> 
> 	1) NFS mount node#/home to each node as /home#. Users 
> 	   would be assigned different base home directories.
> 	2) Use pvfs on the /home space. I am not sure how to set 
> 	   up /home here.
> 	3) If I can find the $$, purchase a new /home disk for the 
> 	   head node, use pvfs on the old /home on each node to 
> 	   create a large scratch space for running computations
> 
> Option 1 should entail quite a heavy communication load, I would think.
> As to option 2, I am concerned with the redundancy in pvfs. If I 
> understand correctly, were the system to lose a node, I have lost the 
> file system. I understand I can reboot the node, but what if I lose a 
> drive on a node. Is all lost in this case? 
> Option 3 looks the best, but it means purchasing a new disk. 
> 

Hi Carey,