[Beowulf] Building new cluster - estimate

[Chris Samuel]

----- "Bogdan Costescu" <Bogdan.Costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Chris Samuel wrote:
> 
> > 1) Use a mainline kernel, we've found benefit of that
> > over stock CentOS kernels.
> 
> Care to comment on this statement ?

a) We found that we got better performance out of
the mainline kernels than the CentOS ones; we guess
because they handle newer hardware better (RHEL is
meant to aim for stability over performance)

b) We can use XFS for scratch space rather than being
tied to the RHEL One True Filesystem (ext3) which
(in our experience) can't handle large amounts of disk
I/O.

YMMV!

cheers,
Chris
-- 
Christopher Samuel - (03) 9925 4751 - Systems Manager
 The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing
 P.O. Box 201, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia
VPAC is a not-for-profit Registered Research Agency