Re: First Beowulf cluster. Some pointers?
On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 03:54:05PM -0200, David Santo Orcero wrote:
> > Unfortunately, system calls get bounced back to the main node. This
> > creates an IO bottleneck (all file reads/writes are done on the main
> > node, no matter where the process got migrated to).
>
> No, system calls get bounced back where the process were created.
I saw MFS (Mosix File System) bundled with mosix. It avoids a lot of the
IO bottleneck by not doing the file reads/writes on the main node. I don't
remember what it does, but its a great improvement over system calls getting
bounced to the main node. It provides a sort of global file system, and
benchmarks with NFS show it to be quite favourable. The papers are
available from the mosix site http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/
But personally, if one is running CPU bound applications, NFS is no big
deal, and even with diskless machines, I've had no trouble with booting
or anything. Of course, its more because of the fact that the machines are
all really fast (500-600 MHz with 128 MB RAM) connected by fast ethernet,
and the file server has /home on SCSI.
viral
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