PVFS

[Jeffery A. White]

The ongoing discussion about PVFS and other file systems caused me
to want to revisit the issue for our application. We are running a
48 node P4 based cluster that has two networks. Net boot and MPI are
run across a fast ethernet network  with a seperate boot server and 
the user file space, that is resident on a hardware RAID5 files server,
is run across a 2nd seperate fast ethernet network. We have multiple
users who pretty much utilize all the compute nodes all the time so I
don't want to give up compute nodes and turn them into PVFS I/O nodes.
However my compute nodes usually only have a 50% to 60% load on them.
My question is would using my existing nodes as both compute and PVFS 
I/O nodes severely degrade their performance as compute nodes? What
about
using dual cpu nodes where one cpu is for compute and one cpu is for
PVFS
I/O? Would that be a better approach or would having the MPI traffic and 
PVFS traffic sharing the same system bus and PCI bus wind up being a
bottle
neeck?

Jeff White
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