[Beowulf] LSI Megaraid stalls system on very high IO?

[Mark Hahn]

> event, and that interaction should have been entirely within bash and other 
> programs already in memory, so there should not be any contention for disk IO 
> there.

isn't that rather hard to tell?  shared library page faulted in, for
instance.  any swapins happening?  it could be there's some unfortunate
path involving memory contention (since doing an IO benchmark is a good 
workout for memory management and scavenging.)  (I guess you could reduce
the chances of the latter by running the benchmark with O_DIRECT.)

regards, mark hahn.