Questions and Sanity Check

[Dan Yocum]

Daniel Ridge wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Keith Underwood wrote:
> 
> > I would use larger hard drives.  The incremental cost from 10GB to 30GB
> > should be pretty small and you may one day appreciate that space if you
> > use something like PVFS.  I would also consider a gigabit uplink to the
> > head node if you are going to use Scyld.  It drastically improved our
> > cluster booting time to have a faster link to the head.
> >
> >                               Keith


Since I haven't built/booted a Scyld cluster yet, and have only seen Don
talk about it at Fermi, please excuse my potentially naive comments.


> For people who are spending a lot of time booting their Scyld slave nodes
> -- I would suggest trimming the library list.
> 
> This is the list of shared libraries which the nodes cache for improved
> runtime migration performance. These libraries are transferred over to
> the nodes at node boot time.


Hm.  Wouldn't it be better (i.e., more efficient) to cache these libs on
a small, dedicated partition on the worker node (provided you have a
disk available, of course) and simply check that they're up-to-date each
time you boot and only update them when they change, say, via rsync?

Cheers,
Dan


-- 
Dan Yocum, Sr. Linux Consultant
Linuxcare, Inc.  630.697.8066 tel
yocum at linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com
Linuxcare. Putting open source to work.