[BBLISA] shared network disks - vs gfs - vs distributed filesystem - vs ...

[Edward Ned Harvey]

I have a bunch of compute servers.  They all have local disks mounted as
/scratch to use for computation scratch space.  This ensures maximum
performance on all systems, and no competition for a shared resource during
crunch time.  At present, all of their /scratch directories are local,
separate and distinct.  I think it would be awesome if /scratch looked the
same on all systems.  Does anyone know of a way to "unify" this storage,
without compromising performance?  Of course, if some files reside on server
A, and they are requested from server B, then the files must go across the
network, but I don't want the files to go across the network unless they are
requested.  And yet, if you do something like "ls /scratch" you would
ideally get the same results regardless of which machine you're on.

 

Due to the nature of heavy runtime IO (read, seek, write, repeat.) it's not
well suited to NFS or any network filesystem.  Due to the nature of many
systems all doing the same thing at the same time, it's not well suited to a
SAN using shared disks. 

 

I looked at gfs (the cluster filesystem) - but - it seems gfs assumes a
shared disk (like a san) in which case there is competition for a shared
resource.

 

I looked at gfs (the google filesystem) - but - it seems they constantly
push all the data across the network, which is good for redundancy and
mostly-just-read operations, and not good for heavy computation IO.

 

Not sure what else I should look at.  Any ideas?

 

TIA.

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