[Beowulf] automount on high ports

[Scott Atchley]

On Jul 2, 2008, at 7:22 AM, Carsten Aulbert wrote:

> Bogdan Costescu wrote:
>>
>> Have you considered using a parallel file system ?
>
> We looked a bit into a few, but would love to get any input from  
> anyone
> on that. What we found so far was not really convincing, e.g.  
> glusterFS
> at that time was not really stable, lustre was too easy to crash -  
> at l
> east at that time, ...

Hi Carsten,

I have not looked at GlusterFS at all. I have worked with Lustre and  
PVFS2 (I wrote the shims to allow them to run on MX).

Although I believe Lustre's robustness is very good these days, I do  
not believe that it will not work in your setting. I think that they  
currently do not recommend mounting a client on a node that is also  
working as a server as you are doing with NFS. I believe it is due to  
memory contention leading to deadlock.

PVFS2 does, however, support your scenario where each node is a server  
and can be mounted locally as well. PVFS2 servers run in userspace and  
can be easily debugged. If you are using MPI-IO, it integrates nicely  
as well. Even so, keep in mind that using each node as a server will  
consume network resources and will compete with MPI communications.

Scott