Sounds like the SiCortex Fabricache: http://sicortex.com/5832_newsletter/the_sicortex_fabricache/ the_sicortex_fabricache_measure_its_abilities_in_genomes_sec
--bob On Nov 23, 2007, at 2:45 PM, Antonio Concas wrote: > There is a particular kind of application, single-client > and serial process, for which a striped file system using > RAM disk would be very useful. Consider reading small > blocks at random locations on a hard disk. The latency > of the HDD could be large, a few milliseconds. Adding more > HDD's does not solve the problem, unlike an application based > on streaming. Adding more disks and parallelizing the program > could be a solution but sometimes there is no time > to parallelize the program. > > A possible solution is RAM disk. But if we put, for example, > 64 GB of RAM on a single computer then that computer becomes > specialized and expensive, whereas the need for a huge > amount of RAM may be only temporary. An alternative is to > use a cluster of nodes, a typical Beowulf cluster. For example, > using a striped file system over 16 nodes where each node has 4 GB > of RAM. Each node would have a normal amount of RAM and yet > could provide the aggregate storage of 64 GB when the need arises. > While we have not yet created this configuration, I suppose > that Gbit Ethernet could provide 100 microsecond latency and > Infiniband or Myrinet could provide 10 microsecond latency. > Much, much less than the seek time of a HDD. > > The idea is so simple that I imagine it has already been done. > I would be interested in learning from other sites that have > used this method with the Lustre file system. > > best regards, > > _______________________________________________ > Lustre-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.clusterfs.com/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss > _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.clusterfs.com/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
