NFS file server performance

[Art Edwards]

I'm new to Beowulf. I have just gotten a small athalon cluster running
under Scyld and I was interested in your comments about file transfer.
I am under the impression that an MPI data transfer does not use NFS. Is 
this true? Also, Given the bus speed of normal motherboards, does 
increasing the network speed have a large impact on global performance?

Art Edwards

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 11:38:02AM -0500, Josip Loncaric wrote:
> Linux NFS is a bottleneck in itself, even with Gigabit Ethernet.  You
> can speed up the network, but the current Linux NFS implementation has
> limitations which make it five times slower than other forms of file
> transfer.  Straight rcp or ftp via Gigabit Ethernet typically reaches
> about 25-30 MB/s, while NFS using the same hardware delivers only about
> 5-6 MB/s.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Josip
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Josip Loncaric, Research Fellow               mailto:josip at icase.edu
> ICASE, Mail Stop 132C           PGP key at http://www.icase.edu./~josip/
> NASA Langley Research Center             mailto:j.loncaric at larc.nasa.gov
> Hampton, VA 23681-2199, USA    Tel. +1 757 864-2192  Fax +1 757 864-6134
> 
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