[Beowulf] Naming Convention Survey

[Brian R Smith]

1) /home - backed-up, secure, intended for long-term storage.  Great 
performance from the head node (for compiling software).  Mounted NFS across 
cluster for read access.

2) /scratch - PVFS2, intended for use during job runs, accessible by all nodes 
and head node.  Not bad at all for a free, COTS solution for a 
high-performance file system.

3) /scratch-local - Local scratch space, usually on the order of about 80 GB 
for jobs that need better performance/latency than PVFS2 over GigE offers.

In a sense, exactly as you described:

/home - a place to compile and keep "stuff"
/scratch - a bit of disk to use while code is running
/scratch-local - a bit of disk with special characteristics, likely 
		high-performance

Although, I would like to shorten the name of /scratch-local at some point... 
seems a bit too much (this from a guy who loves two-letter commands and 
meaningless 1 letter variables in his shell code... commented thoroughly, of 
course).


-Brian Smith

On Monday 09 January 2006 14:28, Brian D. Ropers-Huilman wrote:
> Simple question, likely a complicated answer. Cluster systems should have
> up to three distinct file systems:
>
> 1) a place to compile and keep "stuff"
> 2) a bit of disk to use while code is running
> 3) potential a bit of disk with special characteristics, likely
> high-performance
>
> Typically #1 would be called /home. Here at LSU, #2 is typically called
> /var/scratch or /var/local/scratch. Then there is #3. Sometimes we call
> this /scratch and sometimes /work.
>
> My question: what do other folks call these bits of disk?