[Beowulf] Compute Node OS on Local Disk vs. Ram Disk

[James Braid]

2008/10/2 Bogdan Costescu <Bogdan.Costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de>:
> On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, Eric Thibodeau wrote:
>
>> the NFS root approach only does changes on the head node and changed files
>> don't need to be propagated and are accessed on a as-needed basis, this
>> might have significant impacts on large deployments
>
> NFS-root doesn't scale too well, the implementation of NFS in Linux is quite
> chatty.

It's scaled great in our experience. We run 1000+ machines off NFS
root, running lots of large third-party applications from there as
well.

The NFS servers are just a pair of Linux servers, nothing fancy.