[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Buccaneer for Hire.]

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com>
> To: Beowulf List <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 10:58:58 AM
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] commercial clusters
>
> ??  NFS?  And you claim performance is a problem?  I'm not surprised.
>
> Of the machines I use and manage, I happily see 450MB/s (168 cpu
> machine) and 2.5GB/s (1936 cpu machine)...
>

Of course it is not a surprise.   Traditionally we had tons of nfs servers all over the cluster and that cause one set of nightmares.  Now we are consolidating them and as we start processing larger and larger models, and use advanced computational techniques we are confronted with new issues.  

.Our big cluster is 2000+ plus nodes and we only have some 270TB (I say only cause we'e getting another 100TB+ SAN by year end) and we are able move a lot of production through that cluster and that's what it is all about.   We do have numbers cluster wide.  As we move to the new model, we have to deal with 200 nodes trying to write to one large file, so we need to explore ways of accomplishing this without affecting our production environment.  Any ideas?