[Beowulf] Putting /home on Lusture of GPFS

[Bill Wichser]

> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Prentice Bisbal
> <prentice.bisbal at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>> I was discussing putting /home and /usr/local for my cluster on a GPFS or
>> Lustre filesystem, in addition to using it just for /scratch.

We too have debated this.  Seems a waste to add some 8 or 20 T to a 
local cluster when we have this nice, central filesystem available. And 
it's not like the users aren't already using it for everything now 
anyway.  Yet we always come back to locality of data.  Or at least 
locality of the login directory.  The three filesystems versus one 
filesystem, well, it seems attractive.  Not only to admins but to users 
as well.

In the end, while we'd like to consolidate everything in one place, 
there are reasons not to do so.  I suppose the strongest is that 
clusters are dynamic whereas that central storage, not so much. There 
were Sandybridge executables, then Westmere, then Ivy. Haswell is just 
beginning.  So a new cluster with a local home is a great place for 
these execs, keeping architecture codes distinct. If for no other reason 
this has perpetuated the current method of keeping these local /home 
directories.

I have other reasons as well.  But that is perhaps my strongest this month.

Bill