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Domain: pvfs.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to pvfs.org.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:What I like about it. by debatem1 · · Score: 1 · on Linux System Programming

    PVFS http://www.pvfs.org/

  2. my first cluster setup by Wornstrom · · Score: 4, Interesting · on Building Your First Cluster?

    For my first diskless cluster, I used the warewulf cluster solution to see one up and running. Then, I wiped the master node's disk and built one with the openmosix kernel patch etc, and used the Linux terminal services project which was really cool. the ltsp stuff made the node filesystem stuff easy to build onto. I am waiting for the openmosix team to finish up work and release the userland tools for the 2.6 kernel for my next build. here is a good how-to on LTSP+Openmosix - http://ltsp.org/contrib/ltsp-om5r3c.html

    Once you get that going, you might look at PVFS2 Parallel Virtual File System. "PVFS2 stripes file data across multiple disks in different nodes in a cluster. By spreading out file data in this manner, larger files can be created, potential bandwidth is increased, and network bottlenecks are minimized."

    Good Luck!!

  3. PVFS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Sought for MGM v. Grokster: Non-Infringing P2P Use

    Isn't PVFS2 a P2P sort of system?.. underlying protocol uses peers to create a virtual disk. This takes the idea of P2P as a protocol instead of a piece of end-user software.

  4. Re:I hope the meta-data performance improved... by alecthomas · · Score: 2, Informative · on PVFS2 - a High-Performance Parallel File System
    Has the meta-data server been speed up at all, or made distributed with some kind of coherency-syncro backend?

    From the PVFS2 Guide:

    The new design has a number of important features, including:

    * modular networking and storage subsystems,
    * powerful request format for structured non-contiguous accesses,
    * flexible and extensible data distribution modules,
    * distributed metadata,
    * stateless servers and clients (no locking subsystem),
    * explicit concurrency support,
    * tunable semantics,
    * flexible mapping from file references to servers,
    * tight MPI-IO integration, and
    * support for data and metadata redundancy.
  5. Re:3ware Controllers + Drive Friendly Case by rizzy · · Score: 1 · on Terabyte Storage Solutions?

    You might want to evaluate pvfs2 (pvfs.org/pvfs2)

  6. GFS has no place in scientific computing by rizzy · · Score: 1 · on Red Hat announces GFS
    What is GFS good for? Many things! It would be great for a large computational cluster that had a very large (multi-terabyte) dataset and high disk I/O requirements.


    You can't use GFS in a computational cluster. I've tried. It's not pretty. It wasn't designed for scientific applications.

    • file-based locking: simultaenous writes to a file (parallel checkpointing, parallel image processing) will become serialized and kill your performance
    • scalability: both in cost and stability. The sweet spot for GFS is 1-10 nodes, and you need a super-expensive SAN to get that many.

    Your post is 90% on the money, but for a computational cluster, please use a real parallel file system (one example is PVFS2
  7. Re:How will this affect IBM's GPFS by Troy+Baer · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Red Hat announces GFS
    GFS is more like IBM's SAN Filesystem (a.k.a. Storage Tank) or SGI's CXFS than GPFS, which is more analogous to parallel filesystems like Lustre or PVFS2. The difference is how the clients talk to the underlying storage devices; clients of GFS, SANFS, and CXFS talk directly to the storage devices via Fibre Channel or iSCSI, whereas clients of GPFS, Lustre, and PVFS2 go through some number of intermediate I/O servers.

    --Troy