All:
 
I was wondering if people would mind sharing their implementation on home directories
with regard to Oscar clusters with me. Most of my users have become accustomed
to sitting down at any of our workstations and being able to login automagically and
see the same home directory courtesy of NFS and NIS.
 
But the default Oscar setup is pretty much self contained with home system-unique
directories sitting physically on the head node and then NFS mounted to the compute
nodes. I like that idea since it compartmentalizes the machine and keeps the
network traffic between the nodes strictly at the business of cluster computing,
as opposed to trying to NFS mount external home directories onto each node.
 
In general, are most clusters setup so that users are expected to copy over their
data, run it on the cluster, and then copy their results back? I was toying with the
idea of mounting the external home directories onto the head node in a different
location as a convenience to the users in copying the data over
 
I was also wondering if it is common to setup local scratch directories on each node
so that applications can write directly to disk as opposed to writing into the NFS
mounted home directory. I'm not sure that everything we will be running is well
behaved enough to just use tmp space.
 
 
Thanks.
 
James Wulf

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