Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > >> 5. Possibly some shared space. They do not know yet if shared space is >> useful for a compute cluster. > > I always find the shared space to be instrumental. It may depend on your > types of jobs, but people like to run things ... without knowing where it > runs ... and certain source files etc always reside in a known path. For > example, I normally create a linux cluster with /mycompany/ being shared > space, and /mycompany/home/username is your home directory. So you get the > same environment whichever machine you're on. And then there's a > /scratch/username directory, which is always guaranteed to be on local disk, > separate for each machine. So each machine can do its heavy IO and > calculations under /scratch. No clogging the network or overloading the > fileserver. > > One important side effect: Users are informed to do all heavy work under > /scratch, but they're informed to only create re-creatable data under > /scratch. Because only /mycompany is backed up. Scratch is not backed up. > This is a necessity, by design, if you're creating large stuff there and > need to avoid clogging the network or overloading the fileserver (or backup > server). >
I agree with this, and would add that some software need to share data between nodes in case of parallel processing, so, as usual, you need to look at your process and drive your infrastructure from there. -- Yves. http://www.sollers.ca/ _______________________________________________ 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/
