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<p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>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… <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>Not sure what else I should look at. Any ideas?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>TIA.<o:p></o:p></p>
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