You seem to have conflicting wants/needs. First you said this:
--- On Wed, 7/1/09, Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have a bunch of compute servers.  They all have local disks
> mounted as /scratch to use for computation scratch space.  This ensures
> maximum performance on all systems, and no competition for a shared
> resource during crunch time.  At present, all of their /scratch
> directories are local, separate and distinct.  

Then this:
> I think it would be awesome
> if /scratch looked the same on all systems.  

Does "look the same" mean configured the same? You didn't really expand on this 
statement and clarify the goal, which I'm not sure is uniformity, 
accessibility, or a combo of both.

The minute you move the computation space to networked storage, you've 
undermined your first goal, i.e., "maximum performance on all systems, and no 
competition for a shared resource during crunch time".

You named the storage "/scratch", implying it is just a temporary usage space. 
Are you possibly adding requirements here that are unnecessary?

We have similar HPC systems that write results to local disk space. When the 
computation is completely done, the results are rsynced to separate network 
accessible storage space; the local space is then reclaimed for the next job. 
The rsync is controlled by LSF scripts, but any job management system will have 
similar capabilities. The network available results can then be perused by 
engineers. If they want to keep the results around permanently, they move the 
results at their discretion to longer term storage. Anything that isn't moved 
by the engineers after 7 days is considered unimportant, and deleted after 7 
days. 

Would that paradigm work for you?



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