Re: file systems for linux clusters...
Eray Ozkural (exa) (erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr) said:
> If you're going to make some passes on a database, you
> might want something more than a distributed file system.
> Have a look at the parallel I/O lib in LAM distribution,
> it has a debian package.
>
> > Can anyone suggest which file system we could use?
> > how is the file system plugged into linux?
>
> You could use GFS, PVFS and other older stuff, but those
> would not address the parallel application you suggest.
i would not be so quick to dismiss PVFS. The 'P' stands for parallel,
after all. today, PVFS and GFS solve very different problems. they
might one day become more equivalent, but right now GFS is for storage
networks, and pvfs is for parallel IO.
As you alluded, MPICH and LAM both come with support for ROMIO
(MPI-IO. it's in v2 of the MPI spec ). As i understand it, you have
to configure romio to work with a parallell file system of some sort.
NFS works with romio (poorly, but works). The other romio options are
'unix' ( intended for something like an SGI running CXFS ), cray's
PVS, some other 'big iron' file systems, and PVFS.
build your ROMIO libraries with support for pvfs ( a matter of
specifying the right flag to 'configure' ), and there you go: message
passing codes with access to a parallell file system.
Eray, i haven't used ROMIO without pvfs support: is there a way to
use it without pvfs or nfs as the underlying file system?
==rob
--
Rob Latham: linux A-Team Bethlehem, PA USA
EAE8 DE90 85BB 526F 3181 1FCF 51C4 B6CB 08CC 0897
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