[Beowulf] how cluster's storage can be flexible/expandable?

[Duke Nguyen]

On 11/13/12 6:11 AM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> hi Duke,
>
> Where do you need a parallel file system for if you have 1 fileserver 
> in total?

Vincent, our purpose is to build a cluster and data center which are 
flexible and expandable. Based on my own experience on genome research, 
we will soon need more storage (and nodes for clusters), so our current 
numbers (of nodes, servers etc...) do not count. This first build is 
mainly for learning and planning.

D.

>
> On Nov 12, 2012, at 12:26 PM, Duke Nguyen wrote:
>
>> On 11/12/12 4:42 PM, Tim Cutts wrote:
>>> On 12 Nov 2012, at 03:50, Duke Nguyen <duke.lists at gmx.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 11/9/12 7:26 PM, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Christopher Samuel
>>>>> <samuel at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>>>>> So JBODs with LVM on top and XFS on top of that could be resized on
>>>>>> the fly.  You can do the same with ext[34] as well (from memory).
>>>> We also thought of using LVM on top of RAID disks, but never think of
>>>> XFS. Why do we need XFS and how does this compare with GPFS?
>>> XFS is not a parallel filesystem like GPFS, but a lot of us use it 
>>> because it's so easy to grow the filesystem.  I frequently do this 
>>> with virtual machines to expand their storage.
>>>
>>> 1)  Add new virtual disk
>>> 2)  Scan SCSI buses in Linux
>>> 3)  pvcreate the new device
>>> 4)  vgextend
>>> 5)  lvextend
>>> 6)  xfs_growfs
>>>
>>> Job done.
>>>
>>> On systems in our data centre, we tend to use XFS for most local 
>>> filesystems, unless we have a good reason to use something else.
>>
>> Is there any reason you do not use GlusterFS on top of XFS? Can I do
>> that? With that, can I have a parallel system similar to GPFS?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> D.
>>
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>
>