[Beowulf] statless compute nodes

[Peter Kjellstrom]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2015 12:29:19 -0400 (EDT)
Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> > I was wondering how stateless node fair with very memory intensive
> >applications. Does it simply require you to have a large amount of
> >RAM to house your file system and program data? or are there other
> >limitations?
> 
> it depends.  stateless just means stuff isn't installed on local
> disks;

Or not even that. We extract an image onto a local drive on each boot.
Nodes have no state in this case (the local rootfs essentially just a
cache of the network provided image). This approach I consider
stateless without using RAM or relying on a network-filesystem for os.

/Peter K 

> it can be made available two main ways: as an rdimage (single
> blob provided at boot time via PXE) or as some network-mounted
> filesystem.
...