[Beowulf] network filesystem

[Craig Tierney]

Stu Midgley wrote:
> I'd strongly recommend Lustre.  It will work perfectly well from a
> single server node and give much higher bandwidths than NFS.  If you
> have two nic's you can also serve up the file system over both and see
> around 150MB/s total bandwidth.
> 
> Also, if you need more storage in the future, you can just add more
> servers... and get linear scaling of bandwidth.

How much do you use Lustre?  Yes, you can get that bandwidth,
but if you code doesn't do large-streaming I/O, you performance
will be worse than NFS.  Also, I would like to hear someone
speakup that uses Lustre in a PRODUCTION environment that
doesn't have a kernel hacker on staff.

Also, Lustre metadata doesn't scale (yet).  You can add
another server, but that won't improve the metadata.

Using Lustre also requires you to re-patch your kernel every security 
update, then get the bugs out again.

Lustre is the right answer for some, but if you aren't going
to have that many compute nodes.  It doesn't sound like
it here.

Craig


> 
> Stu.
> 
> 
> On 3/1/07, jaime.perea at gmail.com <jaime.perea at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a small (16 dual xeon machines) cluster. We are going to add
>> an additional machine which is only going to serve a big filesystem via
>> a gigabit interface.
>>
>> Does anybody knows what is better for a cluster of this size, 
>> exporting the
>> filesystem via NFS or use another alternative such as a cluster 
>> filesystem
>> like GFS or OCFS?
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>>
>> -- 
>>
>>            Jaime D. Perea Duarte. <jaime at iaa dot es>
>>              Linux registered user #10472
>>
>>            Dep. Astrofisica Extragalactica.
>>            Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC)
>>            Apdo. 3004, 18080 Granada, Spain.
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> 
>