[Beowulf] file IO benchmark

[Toon Knapen]

John Hearns wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 10:49 +0100, Toon Knapen wrote:
> 
> 
>>The problem is that our parallel direct out-of-core solver thus needs to
>>store tmp data on disk. We already encountered problems when people are
>>using one global NFS mounted filesystem for storing the tmp data of all
>>nodes in the parallel run. 
> 
> For temporary data you should strongly encourage your users to write to
> scratch areas locally on the nodes.
> Or if you are writing the software, configure your software to do that,
> maybe using an environment variable.

We allow users to specify the scratch-directory to make it point to a
local disk but this does not guarantee us that it will effectively point
to a local disk (or performant SAN). I don't see how an env.var. could
solve that?

t