[Beowulf] network filesystem

[Jaime Perea]

Hi,

Well, it seems that this is a hot topic. I'm impressed for
the quality of the answers!

I think that since the disk server machine is not yet installed
it will be useful to do a few tests in advance. 

My idea was to put this filesystem as /home, so there is going
to be a lot of traffic of small files. I tend to think that for doing
parallel intensive work it is better to use a distributed fs such 
as pvfs2. 

I did the question to the list because I imagined that one can
take advantage of things like local cache for the gfs and ocfs2 
cases. We have been smoothly working with gfs but with a
two node and a FC san configuration. We also tested ocfs2
exporting a device via AoE (vblade) in a 3 node configuration, 
and I like the results (and much easier configuration btw) 

But when going to 16 nodes things can change a lot!, perhaps
in that case nfs4 is the best solution (apart from being much
easier to configure and maintain) . 

Thanks a lot!

-- 

           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.