No subject

as a "scratch space" for parallel computation, and will give you a big
increase in performance for those applications (shameless plug :).  If
you are concerned about redundancy (this is actually a good idea from the
management perspective even if you don't care about redundancy), then I
would recommend NFS for the actual /home directory.  NFS survives PC
failure no better than PVFS, but is at least easier to back up because it
resides on one disk.  It is also easier to make use of RAID for disk level
protection if you use NFS because you only have to buy one extra disk to
be able to use software raid mirroring.  Mirroring every drive in a PVFS
cluster could get expensive quickly.  

You don't necessarily need to purchase a new disk for home unless you need
more than 18G for that purpose.  It is perfectly acceptable to use
the existing disk on your head node as an NFS exported home directory and
then use your other 7 node disks as PVFS storage.  This is how we
typically setup clusters at our site and other people seem to have 
success with this configuration as well.

hope this helps,
-Phil

Phil Carns
Parallel Architecture Research Lab
Clemson University