1. A little administrative 'tough love' isn't a bad thing. This is even
if you unify everything under Lustre or GPFS. That same user could use
up all of the inodes in your Lustre MDT just as easily as they can
implode your NFS with reckless usage.
I have seen several instances of /home running on Lustre. Just know the
tradeoffs up front and if you are comfortable with them do it. Given the
small block random I/O challenges in Lustre it can be a more robust
approach to have places where different I/O can be run. (NFS and Lustre
filesystems). That all depends on your NFS infrastructure being able to
endure normal /home usage and small-block/random jobs.
Just my $.02 worth.
On 12/23/14 9:12 AM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
Beowulfers,
I have limited experience managing parallel filesytems like GPFS or
Lustre. I was discussing putting /home and /usr/local for my cluster
on a GPFS or Lustre filesystem, in addition to using it just for
/scratch. I've never done this before, but it doesn't seem like all
that bad an idea. My logic for this is the following:
1. Users often try to run programs from in /home, which leads to
errors, no matter how many times I tell them not to do that. This
would make the system more user-friendly. I could use quotas/policies
to encourage them to use 'steer' them to use other filesystems if needed.
2. Having one storage system to manage is much better than 3.
3. Profit?
Anyway, another person in the conversation felt that this would be
bad, because if someone was running a job that would hammer the
fileystem, it would make the filesystem unresponsive, and keep other
people from logging in and doing work. I'm not buying this concern for
the following reasons:
If a job can hammer your parallel filesystem so that the login nodes
become unresponsive, you've got bigger problems, because that means
other jobs can't run on the cluster, and the job hitting the
filesystem hard has probably slowed down to a crawl, too.
I know there are some concerns with the stability of parallel
filesystems, so if someone wants to comment on the dangers of that,
too, I'm all ears. I think that the relative instability of parallel
filesystems compared to NFS would be the biggest concern, not
performance.
--
------------------------------
Jeff Johnson
Co-Founder
Aeon Computing
[email protected]
www.aeoncomputing.com
t: 858-412-3810 x1001 f: 858-412-3845
m: 619-204-9061
4170 Morena Boulevard, Suite D - San Diego, CA 92117
High-performance Computing / Lustre Filesystems / Scale-out Storage
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