[Beowulf] fast disks for fluent

[Joe Landman]

andrew holway wrote:
> hi,
> 
> We were thinking of using tempfs to make fast scratch disks for fluent. Has
> anyone done this or any other method to ease the disk bottleneck.

Without turning this into an advertisement, we have used our JackRabbit 
system as the launch node for Fluent jobs for a few customers.  They 
regularly work with 20-30 GB case files, and this has made a significant 
(positive) impact upon their work.

I haven't seen it in fluent 6.3, but there has been some talk of 
parallel IO at some point.

The issue with tmpfs is that it is a ram disk, so you are trading ram 
for storage space.  You could potentially starve the fluent run with low 
memory conditions while doing this.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
        http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax  : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615