Florent Calvayrac wrote:
the question is open for the filesystem ; should they rely on NFS over
Gigabit ethernet and attack their "old" fileserver (which is excellent),
with some fears for some heavy I/O codes, add fiberchannel ports to
some (or all) nodes on which the I/O bound codes would be dispatched with
a good PBS setup (best solution but expensive), or add another,
dedicated NFS server with
several gigabit ethernet cards, each for serving only parts of the new
cluster,
this "new" fileserver itself getting its files via CFS, fiberchannel, or
even NFS from the "old" fileserver ?
You already listed many of the possible options. It is very difficult to make an
informed decision as long as you don't have good quantitative information on the
actual I/O load, and also specify the work-flow and reliability requirements for
the files generated or accessed. For some applications, a solution like PVFS
might be sufficient, or even local scratch space might fit.
Adding NFS servers to serve out the CFS to the cluster nodes is a common
solution, although NFS is not well suited for "real" parallel I/O. More
complex/reliable/powerful I/O solutions can become quite expensive, either in
terms of money to effort spent (think of Lustre).
Joachim
--
Joachim Worringen - NEC C&C research lab St.Augustin
fon +49-2241-9252.20 - fax .99 - http://www.ccrl-nece.de
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