Hi Jörg, thanks for the info. I'm converging to the solution regarding RAID now. Thank you a lot for the link I'll be needing it. :)
Well, I don't need too much scratch space, the important part of the disk is the /home with the results. What file system should I use for it, ext3? Best regards, Tomislav Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote: > Hi Tomislav > > I agree with what Skylar wrote. However, ask yourself what are you going to > do > with the cluster? > For example, I am doing quite a lot of molecular modelling, which requires > plenty of RAM and also scratch space. > So for the machines at the old University, I set up /boot and / as RAID1. > Why? > Failover is the answere. In case one disc dies, I have degraded, but working > machine and the next possible time I can sort out the broken hdd. Actually, I > had to do that a few times as somehow the IDE hdd seem to be a bit dogdy and > broke quickly. Fortunately, within one day everything was back in working > order (I swapped both discs in that occassion, so I had to mirror twice). > There is a HowTo setup a failover boot as well. > ( http://www200.pair.com/mecham/raid/raid1.html ) > > Also, if what you are doing needs plenty of scratch space, I would recommend > a > RAID0 and xfs. Best to do that as a hardware raid as it is faster than a > software raid. > > I hope that helps a bit. > > All the best > > Jörg > > > Am Samstag 03 Oktober 2009 schrieb beowulf-requ...@beowulf.org: >> Message: 2 >> Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:41:28 +0200 >> From: Tomislav Maric <tomislav.ma...@gmx.com> >> Subject: [Beowulf] RAID for home beowulf >> To: beowulf@beowulf.org >> Message-ID: <4ac78cc8.5060...@gmx.com> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 >> >> Hi everyone, >> >> I've finally gathered all the hardware I need for my home beowulf. I'm >> thinking of setting up RAID 5 for the /home partition (that's where my >> simulation data will be and RAID 1 for the system / partitions without >> the /boot. >> >> 1) Does this sound reasonable? >> 2) I want to put the /home at the beginning of the disks go get faster >> write/seek speeds, if the partitions are the same, software RAID doesn't >> care where they are? >> 3) I'll leave the /boot partition on one of the 3 disks and it will NOT >> be included in the RAID array, is this ok? >> 4) I've read about setting up parallel swaping via priority given to >> swap partitions in fstab, but also how it would be ok to create RAID 1 >> array of swap partitions for the HA of the cluster. What should I choose? >> >> I've gone through all the software raid how-tos, FAQs and similar, but >> they are not quite new (date at least 3 years) and there's no reference >> to clusters. Any pointers regarding this? >> >> Thank you in advance, >> Tomislav >> >> I'm starting with this: >> >> 3 x Asus P5Q-VM motherboards >> 2 x Intel Quad Core Q8200 2.33GHz (2 nodes with 4 cores) >> 1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 2.6GHz (master node) >> 3 x Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA 2 HDDs >> >> gigabyte Eth switch with 8 ports .... etc ... >> >> Best regards, >> Tomislav _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
