FW: [Beowulf] file IO benchmark

[Joachim Worringen]

Imran Khan wrote:
> Joe,
> 
> I would have said the same about panasas but I like terragrid as every thing
> is pretty much standard so not to many high over heads, plus it offers the
> following: 
> 
> Standard Linux filesystem, and tools, so no re-training

Imran,

as far as I understood, some modifications to the file system *are* required to 
make it match with the consistency semantics of the Terragrid iSCSI target. 
Therefore, the descriptions I read always state that you can run ext2 via 
Terragrid, and nothing else. Are other file systems available now? What kind of 
patches are required (these should be open source, shouldn't they?)?

> TerraGrid does not use a Meta Data Controller, so scales linearly.

This is a nice point of the architecture; however, it is not clear that the MDC 
does in fact become a bottleneck. Lustre people, i.e., claim that thas has not 
been a problem even for large clusters.

> TerraGrid is the only CFS solution with a 24X7 resilient option!

What do you mean by 24x7? If a fs has redundancy, it will always work 24x7, 
doesn't it? Marketing pitch?

> Increased reliability by support for diskless cluster nodes

Do you consider this a special feature of the fs? You can achieve the same using 
NFS!

  Joachim

-- 
Joachim Worringen - NEC C&C research lab St.Augustin
fon +49-2241-9252.20 - fax .99 - http://www.ccrl-nece.de