[Beowulf] Storage and cachefs on nodes?

[Kimmo Kallio]

I can guarantee you are not the only one interested in this... we've been
even semi-seriously thinking of implementing this ourself, but there is
never enough time as usual.

I've been toying on the idea of extending Linux (memory) buffer cache to
utilise local disk as raw block device instead of going through a
filesystem. This wouldn't be reboot-persistent, but wouldn't suffer from
filesystem corruption or such meaning that there would be no extra (human)
management overhead on individual machines. However, I haven't gotten as
far as finding out if this is realistically doable or not.

As for the storage in general we use NetApp filers and their DNFS
(NetCache) caching devices. It's reliable but doesn't come cheap. We are
looking for distributed filesystems (Lustre, Terragrid, ...) to complement
the existing setup.

Regards,

Kimmo Kallio, Europen Bioinformatics Institute

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz wrote:

> Anybody using cachefs(-alike) and local disks on nodes for
> reboot-persistent cache of huge central storage?
> 
> 
> (I periodically and obsessively repeat this poll with negative answer
> ever so far, obviously I am the only person with data storage needs
> perverted this way. Given the recent interest in storage, I dare to
> ask again...)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Vaclav Hanzl
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