Shared diskspace between nodes

[Jon E. Mitchiner]

Greetings!

I presently run a 40-node cluster, Dual 1GHz with 20GB hard drive on each
system.  This gives me roughly 15GB (safe estimate) after the OS, installed
programs, some data, etc on each machine.  This gives me roughly 600GB of
space that I am not currently utilizing on 40 nodes.

Right now, we are saving data on various nodes, and moving it around when
space gets tight on a machine.  This is getting time consuming as some of us
have to look on different nodes to find out where your data is currently
residing.  I am considering saving all directory names in a database and
then making a GUI interface via the web so its easy to find the location of
data directories, rather than looking for it (especially if someone moved my
directory to another machine without letting me know).

I am curious if there is a program out there that might be able to utilize
the space that we are not utilizing -- such as linking the file space
between nodes so that way I can set up a "large" data partition sharable by
all nodes.  Some redunancy would be nice.  Im curious if there is a software
solution (either GPL licensed, or commercial) to utilize the space better.

Optimally, it would be nice to see all "shared" drives as one large
partition to be mounted to all nodes and all the data is handled by a daemon
or something like that.

Does anyone have any ideas, suggestions, or programs that might be able to
do something similar?

Thanks!

Regards,

Jon E. Mitchiner
Minotaur Technologies
http://www.minotaur.com
AOL IM [http://www.aol.com/aim] MinotaurT