[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Gerry Creager]

Chris Samuel wrote:
> ----- "Bogdan Costescu" <Bogdan.Costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Chris Samuel wrote:
>>
>>> 1) Use a mainline kernel, we've found benefit of that
>>> over stock CentOS kernels.
>> Care to comment on this statement ?
> 
> a) We found that we got better performance out of
> the mainline kernels than the CentOS ones; we guess
> because they handle newer hardware better (RHEL is
> meant to aim for stability over performance)

Hadn't thought about this, but it makes a lot of sense.

> b) We can use XFS for scratch space rather than being
> tied to the RHEL One True Filesystem (ext3) which
> (in our experience) can't handle large amounts of disk
> I/O.

Mirrors our experience, too.
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
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