[Beowulf] diskless cluster nfs

[Josh Kayse]

Ok, my first post, so please be gentle.

I've recently been tasked to build a diskless cluster for one of our
engineers.  This was easy because we already had an image for the set
of machines.  Once we started testing, the performance was very poor. 
Basic setup follows:

Master node: system drive is 1 36GB SCSI drive
                     /home raid5 5x 36GB SCSI drives
Master node exports /tftpboot/192.168.1.x for the nodes.

all of the nodes are diskless and get their system from the master
node over gigabit ethernet.
 All that worsk fine.

The engineers use files over nfs for message passing, and no, they
will not change their code to mpi even though it would be an
improvement in terms of manageability and probably performance.

Basically, my question is:  what are some ways of testing the
performance of nfs ande then, how can I improve the performance?

Thanks for any help in advance.

PS: nfs mount options: async,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard
       file sizes: approx 2MB
-- 
Joshua Kayse
Computer Engineering