[Beowulf] need for an advice on nfs and diskless clients

[Joe Landman]

Greetings Maxime:

Maxime Kinet wrote:

> I know that there are several different options to make several clients 
> mounting their filesystems, and that this one might not be the most 
> efficient one, but I choosed that one just because I knew already how to 
> do it. Now everything works fine, except that I would like to spare some 
> diskspace on the master partition. Since each filesystem is around 500 
> Mb, I quickly reach more than 10Gb just for the /tftpboot directory.

Have you looked at using UnionFS or AuFS to make a single shared file 
system for the nodes, with a writable/localized component?  I presume 
that most of the nodes will share most of the (static) files.  /var and 
a few others (/proc /sys /etc ...) should likely be localized, but this 
is fairly easy to do with UnionFS/AuFS.

Also, have you looked at Perceus?  They have a good system for running 
out of a RAM disk, which you can leverage here as well.  There are some 
diskless based cluster efforts that you could also explore (onesis).


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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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