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High Performance Diskless Linux At AX-Div, LLNL

Posted by timothy on from the four-letter-acronym dept.

Lee Busby writes "As a co-author, I am biased, but I think that our recent paper describing a diskless Linux deployment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (PDF)may be of general interest. It's a little different than most diskless systems -- simpler, and designed to be high performance."

4 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. NFS? by ghostlibrary · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This has some nice configuration management ideas. Given that a linux distribution is small, cloning them for each diskless is a neat approach to balance centralized management versus changing hardware.

    That said... NFS is woefully insecure so, if subversion by an insider is a problem (as it would be with, say, disk workstations), NFS may not be the best choice for handling the disk management.

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    A.
  2. Networked File systems by wowbagger · · Score: 2, Informative

    A quick skim of the PDF leads me to believe they are still using NFS for the operation.

    My question would be, does anybody have any meaningful experiences using CodaFS or Intermezzio?

    Where I work, we have NFS mounted home directories. When the main server goes down, we all get to twiddle our thumbs because we cannot do anything without a home directory.

    It would seem to me that the caching of Coda and Intermezzio would be better - you still have the centralized management of the disk images, but you also get the speed of local access and the robustness of not having a single failure point in the server.

    But I've not had time to set up a trial system - has anybody else?

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    www.eFax.com are spammers
    1. Re:Networked File systems by Craigory · · Score: 3, Informative

      At my University there is a fairly large Andrew system which performs well. The only gotcha is that Andrew implements its own non-Unix file permissions, which is a bit confusing. Coda is of course based on Andrew. It differs only slightly in its concurrent write semantics.

  3. Re:iSCSI? by 4of12 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sharing common resources is great, and NFS performance is increased if they're all mounted read-only on the clients.

    Keeping some protection and partition of /home/me over iSCSI to a single workstation seems like a good idea to me. Given all the concerns of classified processing, it's not like you and some other workstation are going to be routinely part of a parallel cluster where multiple clients need write access to the same filesystem.

    Then, each client would only need a writable /etc for system configuration and /var for log files over iSCSI.

    I'm not familiar enough to know, but if the traffic is read only, can't the same /usr/bin be exported to multiple clients via iSCSI?

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    "Provided by the management for your protection."