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

[Eric Thibodeau]

Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> 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.
Someone else responded to this, and expect even more scalability 
performance with NFSv4...lots more ;)
>
>> I'll take your word for it that they have a version tracking mechanism.
>
> Take my word that if you're going into larger installations with the 
> least amount of non-homogeneity you'll want to at least read about, if 
> not use, such mechanisms :-)
>

Well, "large" is relative, if I have a 32k core cluster with all 
identical HW, all I really need for this "large" installation is a 
single image.. It's the diversity that kills that then requires tight 
version/config tracking, even if all the images are managed from a 
single point..but that's trivial common sense ;)

Eric