I have a small (16 dual xeon machines) cluster. We are going to add
an additional machine which is only going to serve a big filesystem via
a gigabit interface.
are you comfortable with the expected performance of this design?
that is, without any tuning/tweaking, you should achieve ~70 MB/s
assuming the server's local disk(s) can manage, etc.
Does anybody knows what is better for a cluster of this size, exporting the
filesystem via NFS or use another alternative such as a cluster filesystem
like GFS or OCFS?
NFS is really easy. for a small cluster and only Gb, I wouldn't
even consider anything else. once you get into hundreds of nodes
(or perhaps fewer very IO-intensive ones), alternatives are probably
necessary. mostly, I'd decide on aggregate bandwidth requirements,
though I'm sure NFS overhead eventually becomes a problem (thousands
of nodes). I think your cluster would be very happy with 1-2 Gb
links from the server, fed with a nice fast md-based raid array.
regards, mark hahn.
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
