As pointed by others, if MPI traffic is not a concern (only a "massive" reading
at beginning + writing at end), single NIC + NFS should handle it, in our case
we have a diskless cluster with 15 slaves+master and rarely we deal with
bottlenecks caused by NFS loads and we are not even using RAID.
We are using CentOS 5.2 with default values for NFS server, the master is a
single Xeon 5410 with 4GB (Supermicro Twin 1U), each slave nodes has 2 x xeon
5410.
For the provisioning and node management, I've been using Perceus 1.5. Under
CentOS the installation is quite straightforward and simple, just be sure of
activating the Perceus modules for name of hosts, group/users, ip address and
so on. I'm using NFS for provisioning rather than XGET which for some versions
of Perceus is the default provisioning mechanism (XGET was much more slower
and sometimes hanged, but I know that Infiniscale has been working hard on this
for the latest version, so you can give a try). There is also Caos Linux
distribution with the "full package" for clusters ready to go. Perceus and some
other cluster-related stuff are included by default in Caos.
About the flash usb, same here, we tried it and it was quite slow.
Good luck
Sam.
.
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