[Beowulf] PVFS or NFS in a Beowulf cluster?

[Mark Hahn]

> I don't see a contradiction to use both: NFS for the home directories (on some 
> sort of master node with an attached hardware RAID), PVFS2 for a shared scratch 
> space (in case the applications need a shared scratch space across the nodes). 

that's certainly attractive.  has anyone tried PVFS2 in a *parallel* cluster?

that is, for tight-coupled parallel applications, it's quite critical avoid 
stealing cycles from the MPI worker threads.  I'd be curious to know how much
of a problem PVFS2 would cause this way.

thanks, mark hahn.