[Beowulf] NFS server for a small cluster

[Mark Hahn]

> I'm going to prepare NFS server for my small PS3-cluster. So, I've a
> question: if I use 4 SATAII ports for 250 GB disks in software RAID0, is
> the performance of CPU critical?

raid0 copies data around, but is not particularly cpu-intensive
(raid5 is worse; r6 worser).  but the network is just gigabit,
right?  which means that the bandwidth is only about 1 disk work
anyway (a modern disk sustains > 130 MB/s on the outer half...)

> Witch one should I use Core Duo/1 MB cache
> or Core2Duo/6 MB cache and how much of DDR2-800 RAM, 2 GB or 8 GB?

extra ram doesn't help a fileserver much except when you can read-cache
effectively (either file contents or metadata.)  I wouldn't sweat cache
size, and probably not ram size either (unless your working set really
is < 8GB.)