PVFS and Coda (was Re: RAID controller question...)

[Troy Benjegerdes]

[snip snip]

> The Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) does most of what
> Vesta does and then some and was originally designed for Beowulf architectures.
> It is currently available in a user-level version that does not involve any
> kernel mods - just some daemons and a client library.  It can be used with
> any program - even without recompiling, and has features for access of the
> files by parallel tasks.  We are currently builing a true Linux file system
> that will consist of a few kernel mods, but essentially the same code.
> 
> http://ece.clemson.edu/parl/pvfs/
> 
I took a brief look at PVFS, and it looks quite usefull for large
parrallel i/o jobs, but does it have any data/file replication
capablilities? Also, how does an application use PVFS without any mods if
it is only a user level daemon, or is this for the next release?

I am planning to take a look at Coda (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu) on a 8
machine cluster we just got. Coda has file/data replication and a
distributed, multiple server architecture.  It looks like it might be a
very nice way to have a common shared filesystem over an entire clusters,
without the bottleneck of one NFS server. Plus the fact that it's free,
under a BSD-ish liscencse.

I rather doubt the performance will be anywhere near PVFS, however... But
it would allow you to do away with a dedicated main file server which
either has RAID redundancy or nightly backups because of the data
replication.

> Walt
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Walter B. Ligon III
> Assistant Professor
> ECE Department
> Clemson University
> 

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| Troy Benjegerdes    |    troybenj@iastate.edu    |    hozer@drgw.net   |
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