[Beowulf] distributing storage amongst compute nodes

[Leif Nixon]

"Jeffrey B. Layton" <laytonjb at charter.net> writes:

> Leif Nixon wrote:
>> Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> writes:
>>
>>
>>> [...] commodity disks are plenty reliable
>>> and are not a significant source of uptime problems.
>>>
>>
>> That's not quite a general truth. 8^)
>>
>
> Even though the data shows otherwise?

OK, let me rephrase: That's just true in general, and it's the
specific cases that bite you.

On *average* disks might not be a large source of problems, but when
you run into a bad batch it hurts. But that's true for all components,
of course.

My take on this might be a bit coloured from spending some time the
other day in the company of a representative sample of disks from a
certain bad batch, a crowbar, a sledgehammer and several pounds of
thermite. (Sorry, rgb, no sucker rod available around here.)

-- 
Leif Nixon                       -            Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre    -      Linkoping University
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