I'm working on some software which runs on a workstation cluster. The way
we are distributing the work on the cluster, each node needs to do a
significant amount of I/O. Currently, we have the file system that we
are working on NFS mounted between the workstations.
Not surprisingly, the I/O performance using NFS is very bad. I am looking
for alternatives to using NFS. The only commercial alternative I am aware
of us AFS.
I was wondering if anyone has done some performance studies of large I/O
over AFS [we are reading and writing files in excess of 8MB]. I know a
little about AFS, and my gut reaction is that it will be better than NFS,
but still not fast enough for our high performance application. I suspect,
therefore, that we will need to develop an in-house solution to this
performance bottleneck. But I was hoping to get some empirical data to
back up my gut feeling.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Chuck Hastings
Pacific Sierra Resarch Corp
