Posted by Kenneth Farmer, Tuesday October 01 2002 @ 07:20AM EDT
Linux clusters have become so successful that they've proliferated internationally through research labs, universities, and large industries that require an inexpensive source of high performance computing cycles. Developers and users have pushed the technology by scaling their applications to more and more processors so that larger problems can be solved more quickly. This has resulted in clusters where some applications can actually become I/O bound -- the input/output of data to/from a large number of processors limits the performance of the application.
Most Linux clusters use NFS (the Network File System) to share data among nodes and provide a consistent name space across all machines. As a result, parallel applications (executing simultaneously on multiple processors) typically read data from files stored on a single disk on a single server.
While NFS works well for small clusters (less than 32 nodes), its performance decays rapidly as more than 64 nodes start making simultaneous I/O requests. These requests "saturate" the NFS server that stores the files of interest.
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