[Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf

[Tomislav Maric]

John Hearns wrote:
> 2009/10/4 Tomislav Maric <tomislav.maric at gmx.com>:
>>
>> No, the nodes are diskless. I plan to scale the cluster and 1TB of
>> storage is quite enough, even if I use 6 nodes, or 2x6 nodes. That's
>> actually what I know from my small experience in running CFD codes on 96
>> cores cluster.
> 1 Tbyte?  Are you sure... depends on your workload of course, but I
> would plan for a bit more!

Yes, definitely, I'm removing the results after postprocessing, and I'm
the only user. :) For three nodes, it will be more than enough, but
after scaling and with adding more users, I'll definitely need more.

> 
>  That's the reason for thinking about RAID in the first
>> place: create stable and good performing centralized storage for the
>> future number of the nodes (i.e. 12 nodes with 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM
>> each).
> That's a good policy.
> You should be looking at running one benchmark case, and getting as
> much information from it as possible - ie. how often it writes a
> solution file, how big that file is, and how long it takes.

That's the plan, I just need to get it to work first. ;)

> 
> It might definitely be worth looking at a parallel filesystem also -
> ie. keep your main storage on a 'conventional' RAID and have a few
> Tbytes of scratch (temporary) storage on the faster filesystem for the
> solution files.

OK, thank you very much, I'll keep that in mind: I'll leave some space
on the disks for that.

Best regards,
Tomislav