[Beowulf] large scratch space on cluster

[Scott Atchley]

On Sep 29, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:

> However, I was wondering whether it does make any sense to somehow  
> 'export'
> that scratch space to other nodes (4 cores only). So, the idea  
> behind that
> is, if I need a vast amount of scratch space, I could use the one in  
> the 8
> core node (the one I mentioned above). I could do that with nfs but  
> I got the
> feeling it will be too slow. Also, I only got GB ethernet at hand,  
> so I
> cannot use some other networks here. Is there a good way of doing  
> that? Some
> words like i-scsi and cluster-FS come to mind but to be honest, up  
> to now I
> never really worked with them.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> All the best
>
> Jörg

I am under the impression that NFS can saturate a gigabit link.

If for some reason that it cannot, you might want to try PVFS2 (http://www.pvfs.org 
) over Open-MX (http://www.open-mx.org).

Scott