Scyld and pvfs ...

[Phil Carns]

...
>  The question is : is possible to use Scyld to have a complete os install
> on every node (and not just a small boot partition) and to make it coexist
> w/ PVFS ?
...

> 
>  Thank you all in advance,
> Franz

Hi Franz,

You can in fact run PVFS just fine with the Scyld Beowulf
distribution.  Those of you at SC2000 may have stumbled upon our remote
sensing app (CERSe) demo at the back of the NASA booth-  we have a small
cluster on display that makes use of both the Scyld software and PVFS as
part of its infrastructure.

I guess sense there is some interest now I should make a little FAQ and
perhaps a small PVFS patch to make this easier for people to set up.  If
you want to contact me off of the list I can show you the scripts I used
and steps that are needed get everything going quickly.  (a patch is not
strictly necessary, but the PVFS io server daemons sortof expect certain
config files to be present on the nodes, which goes against the Scyld
paradigm for how nodes are configured :)  

Running PVFS on the Scyld distribution is actually rather nice because you
can check the status of remote I/O daemons by simply typing "ps" on the
head node.

thanks,
-Phil

Phil Carns
Parallel Architecture Research Lab
Clemson University