On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 12:16 -0600, Craig Tierney wrote: > Dan Stromberg wrote: > >> Ooops, sorry, english is not my native language and I can make > >> mistakes :-) I liked pvfs before and I love pvfs2 now. > >> > >> Well, I think the problems are those you are mentioning, first it > >> goes a bit slower than let's say nfs or something like gfs over gnbd > >> (for small clusters)... in any case it is not so slow. The other > >> is that you need the nodes that are metadata or I/O servers have > >> to be up, that means that the probability of file system failure is higher. > >> > >> The adventages are many, parallel I/O is a plus, not only for mpi programs > >> but also for the normal tasks, if you try to convert the format of a lot > >> of images you can split the work between nodes, but this is an adventage > >> only if your file system can handle that, which is not the case of nfs > >> obviously. > >> > >> In other words, pvfs2 is free, great and useful. it works well as a > >> scratch area and it uses resources that otherwise are not visible > >> for the user. And for myrinet users it goes over gm which is nice. > > > > On a somewhat related note, are there any FOSS filesystems that can > > surpass 16 terabytes in a single filesystem - reliably? > > What do you want to do with your 16 TB? Does PVFS2 not meet your needs > or your level of reliability? What don't you find reliable about it?
We want to store scientific datasets - and we actually wanted more like 30T, but had to settle for less. > I expect that xfs would work just fine. The question is, how can you > access it? You can export it with NFS, but the performance doesn't scale. If it'd be at least semi reliable, this application would probably be fine with that. > Why FOSS (not to start a flame war)? What if AcmeFS was reasonably > priced and did what you needed it to do? We already have a commercial solution that's working pretty well, so if we go commercial, we might return to that. FOSS tends to improve faster though, and if you get it with a support contract, it seems pretty win-win. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
