[Beowulf] Putting /home on Lusture of GPFS

[Christopher Samuel]

On 24/12/14 04:12, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> Anyway, another person in the conversation felt that this would be bad,
> because if someone was running a job that would hammer the fileystem, it
> would make the filesystem unresponsive, and keep other people from
> logging in and doing work.

I don't believe we've ever seen this issue with GPFS and we have some
people running some pretty pathological codes for I/O (including
OpenFOAM which is plain insane and some of the bioinformatics codes that
want to do single byte synchronous I/O).

I think the worst issue we've had was a problem with OpenFOAM with a
user who ran us out of inodes - they created many millions of
directories, each with 4 files in them.  But we killed the job, added
metadata disks online to extend inodes and then educated the user.  It's
not something unique to GPFS though (and could probably be harder to
recover from on other filesystems).

All the best,
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
 http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci