On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> | Hmm. I use SCSI on high-performance systems, but if IDE is so bad, why
> | does NASA use IDE? ;)
>
> as far as I know, beowulf tends to use the network more than the disk, so it
> isn't necessary to have an extremely fast disk subsystem. RAM, CPU, and
> network speeds are much more important.
The CESDIS Beowulf web site describes two projects.
1) Ordinary Beowulf clusters designed as a dedicated, single user,
parallel compute platform. In this case, having a fast disk
subsystem on each node allows disk I/O to scale with the number of
nodes. If your code either produces or consumes tons of data,
having a fast local disk subsystem with low CPU overhead is a huge
bonus. This is one of the fundamental advantages of beowulves over
traditional parallel computers.
2) The Beowulf Bulk Data Server, a project to use Beowulf technology
to build a very large (terabyte), very fast (gigabyte/second)
fileserver for use with MPP supercomputers. This project is
focusing on IDE disk technology.
- C
