> couldn't you boot from a usb storage device, rather than use up valuble > ram?
as mentioned before, the memory overhead of net-booting can be quite trivial. a 96x2 cluster I did some years ago has 4-8GB nodes, and uses at most a few MB of initrd when booting (freed when the NFS root can be mounted.) unless you've got some pretty specialized hardware, you're not going to build a cluster with less than 1GB/node these days. as such, even tens of MB of ramdisk is not any kind of big deal. booting from usb is really just another diskful solution. they're fine, and usb has some clear advantages over moving parts. but it's still something you have to configure for each node, and therefore less malleable. > shurely is cost effective as 512 of ram cost about 3 times as much > as 512 of usb mem. you're right, I hadn't thought of it in those terms. but it's still per-node-installation, and therefore less scalable in many ways. bear in mind that when people opt for diskful solutions, they usually want big local storage for swap, /tmp, etc. I claim that net booting _and_ diskful is the right thing (just don't boot from the disk). after all, vendors will often charge _extra_ for diskless nodes, since their norm is diskful. as part of a $1-4K node, evne a 160G disk is just not a major concern. > and you could pull the usb 'keys' out to re configure or what not from > other nodes that the admin can work from. you don't want to do that for even a 64-node cluster, let alone hundreds... _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
