[Beowulf] Should I go for diskless or not?

[Douglas Eadline]

Santa,

Keep in mind

 diskless nodes - nodes with out disks
 diskless provisioning - booting nodes without using local disk.

You can do diskless provisioning on nodes with disk. The disk
is used for local swap and scratch space. Many people make
the wrong assumption that if they do diskless provisioning they
can/should not have disk on the nodes.

Diskless provisioning is usually easier to mange.

As far as performance, it all depends... In general
diskless is faster. Check out Scyld, Perceus, Onesis,
xCat, others.

--
Doug

PS I have been good this year, so far.


> I have a cluster of identical computers. We are planning to add more nodes
> later. I was thinking whether I should go the diskless nodes way or not?
> Diskless nodes seems as a really exciting, interesting and good option,
> however when I did it I needed to troubleshoot a lot. I did fix it up, but
> I
> had to redo the filesystem, but the past experiences didn't make much of a
> difference. I still need to fix up everything, I kinda need your help to
> decide.
> Also, performance wise, I was thinking that diskless is not a good option,
> and since performance matters . . .
> Can somebody outline the pros and cons of each or just give me thier
> opinion.
>
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--
Doug

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