[Beowulf] High Performance for Large Database

[Laurence Liew]

Hi,

Yes .. if you use GFS rule of thumb of 1:8 it can support 512 compute 
nodes....  provided you use NFS to re-export the GFS filesystem.... you 
may not get the performance you want with a GFS + NFS approach.

If you use a direct GFS approach.. then you are limited to 64 nodes 
currently.... that is on each compute node.. you run GFS to access a 
central SAN storage.

Laurence

Michael Will wrote:
> On Monday 15 November 2004 05:26 am, Laurence Liew wrote:
> 
>>The current version of GFS have a 64 node limit.. something to do with 
>>maximum number of connections thru a SAN switch.
> 
> Does this mean 64 nodes with direct SAN access or 64 client nodes?
> 
> 64 IO nodes could support a larger cluster than just 128 nodes IMHO.
> 
> Michael 
> 
>>I believe the limit could be removed in RHEL v4.
>>
>>BTW, GFS was built for enterprise and not specifically for HPC... the 
>>use of SAN (all nodes need to be connected to a single SAN storage).. 
>>may be a bottleneck...
>>
>>I would still prefer the model of PVFS1/2 and Lustre where the data is 
>>distributed amongst the compute nodes
>>
>>I suspect GFS could prove useful however for enterprise clusters say 32 
>>- 128 nodes where the number of IO nodes (GFS nodes with exported NFS) 
>>can be small (less than 8 nodes)... it could work well
>>
>>Cheers!
>>Laurence
>>
>>Chris Samuel wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 12:08 pm, Laurence Liew wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>You may wish to try GFS (open sourced by Red Hat after buying
>>>>Sistina)... it may give better performance.
>>>
>>>
>>>Anyone here using the GPL'd version of GFS on large clusters ?
>>>
>>>Be really interested to hear how folks find that..
>>>
>>>
>>>
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> 

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Laurence Liew, CTO		Email: laurence at scalablesystems.com
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