It sounds like you're looking at a clustered file system. Where on the Fast/Cheap/Reliable triangle do you want to land? Keep in mind: you should accept that if you want to have all systems see the same unified file system and not have a shared storage media (fibre, iSCSI, etc), then you will have your reads and writes go across the network.
If you're looking for fast/cheap, then you might want to look at Lustre ( http://www.lustre.org/). It works well on RHEL & SUSE derivatives, makes use of distributed resources. It does have support for Infiniband if you've got that. Lustre writes across multiple nodes and multiple partitions in order to gain speed. Additionally, it uses block-level locking instead of file-level locking which can also speed things up. Be warned: there is a fairly steep learning curve for Lustre. Also in the fast/cheap camp is Gluster (http://www.gluster.org/), though I don't know anyone using Gluster in the supercomputing community, though. If you want fast/reliable and are willing to spend money, maybe looking at commercial products like GPFS, BlueArc, Panasas would be the way to go. -John Reddy
_______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
