Re: First Beowulf cluster. Some pointers?

[stramiello <stramiello@whiterabbit.resnet.gatech.edu>]

> Try to avoid NFS at all costs.  (disclaimer, i'm pretty much just
> retyping what i've seen yesterday on the beowulf mailing list) NFS
> works well in a workstation environment where a user does some IO but
> is generally idle a lot of the day.  NFS in a beowulf is not so good
> a choice because it's slow (especially without the 2.4 NFS backport)
> and has cache consistency problems.   Bootup will suck, since 15 nodes
> are going to try to access the NFS server at once.  (not that it can't
> handle it, but serving 15 root partitions takes time: time you could
> use doing computations)

When you've got a cluster that has to be wheeled into and out of
classified rooms, it's much more simplistic to have only 1 hdd to control,
rather than n+1 harddrives. ;-)
 
~Warren