[Beowulf] PVFS or NFS in a Beowulf cluster?

[Kumaran Rajaram]

   I would suggest PVFS2. It offers greater bandwidth (proportional to
number of I/O nodes dedicated) compared to NFS. Also, you may use PVFS2
native file interface (rather than POSIX I/O interface) which offers
flexible parallel I/O interface for scientific workloads. Only caveat, is
fault-tolerance support and you might need to employ either
software/hardware RAID for disk failures and heartbeat mechanism for
server failures. If the environment has less probability of
server/disk/netowrk faults, then PVFS2 is a good choice for scientific
workloads and parallel applications.

-Kums

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Stavros E. Zogas wrote:

> Hi at all
> I intend to setup a beowulf cluster(16+ nodes) for scientific
> applications(fortran compilers) in a University department.What am i supposd
> to use???PVFS or NFS for file system??
> Stavros
>