hi! We're getting a new cluster for Christmas this year, and I am wondering whether there are better options than the nfs-server setup used on our old one. Unfortunately we don't have any people who have had the chance to try things out, and we won't have much time either. I'd really appreciate some comments on what would make sense for us and what would not. (I did read up some, but everyone claims to be best...) We've got: Five nodes 16GB/dual 275 opteron, one 32GB DB-host and one 8GB fileserver. The latter two have external SCSI-Raids. All are interconnected via Infiniband. We will expand to 12 or 16 nodes with the next round of money. The old cluster (as provided by our IBM vendor) uses a NFS-server connected to a fibre-channel raid. Filesystem performance is a [expletive deleted] major problem. We will use the cluster for serveral different bioinformatics tools, some of which I've been told produce directories with many thousands of files. Does iSCSI+GFS make sense? And more so than NFS? Would you route it via the Infiniband network or via GbE? How about Lustre, PVFS2, OCFS? regards, Elmar ps: Please do tell me the combination of hardware makes at least a little sense. The infiniband was something of an afterthought, since it was unexpectetly cheap. -- Linux-cluster@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-cluster
