export disks from nodes?

[hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz]

> > - anybody figured out all the things needed for NFS server on [scyld] node?
> 
> This is the main problem, getting the daemons and the files they require
> onto the nodes, but even that can be tricky.

Might be worth creating light stripped-down version of NFS machinery -
anybody heard about anything like this? Maybe there is a one-floppy
linux distribution with NFS server to start with?


> > - can PVFS do that? (without slowing down mostly local HD access)
> 
> This is probablly your best bet, but I'm not sure how it would slow down
> local HD access.  With PVFS you take a number of slave nodes and speicfy
> them to serve data, and a filesystem is created that is split among all
> those nodes, much like RAID striping.  If anything, accessing a file off
> a PVFS filesystem should be faster than off an NFS filesystem due to the
> distributed nature of it.

My application is rather special cause it is nearly perfect regarding
HD/CPU communication - it is quite happy with every HD streaming data
to CPU in the same box for tens of minutes, then results are quickly
mixed using network and all this repeats. There is not much left for
PVFS to help with - application itself keeps all HDs busy and all CPUs
busy, so it makes no sense to send data over network.

Network access to all data is infrequent, I just want it to be
possible and relatively easy (easier than to bpcp them).

However I am not a PVFS expert, maybe PVFS could help even under these
circumstances (any opinions?).

Regards and Thanks

Vaclav