Diskless Cluster Running

[hallen]

Yes, but without a good network connection it really slows things down. Since the seti client has to access its files on the server's hard drive it's important to have a fast connection. One of my nodes is a P4 1.6A that used to average 3 hours per unit. Now it's veraging 4:10 - so the network has added an hour to its average.

What about SETI using a RAM drive?

 

[TC]

What about SETI using a RAM drive?

That would be great, but I have no idea how to create a ram drive on a node and get the seti client loaded into it.

 

[hallen]

I'm looking. Came across this:

According to the kernel FAQ, Linux ext2 implementation is fast enough

that it is not necessary to implement /tmp as a ramdisk. Some systems
(they give stats, I think solaris is one of them) is much slower with
on-disk filesystems so Sun went with a ramdisk for performance with
temp files. I don't think you'll get much, if any, performance boost
from using a ramdisk. In the kernel config, look for "shm" (I think)
in the filesystem section. If you press "help" on it you'll see a
discussion of tmpfs (the other name for it). You can then mount it
with an entry in /etc/fstab.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2001/debian-user-200110/msg03021.html

And this:

To enable a fixed-size ramdisk, you need to select CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM.

To enable the "Virtual Memory Filesystem", choose CONFIG_TMPFS. The
documentation is a bit confusing for this as it indicates that this
filesystem is intended for POSIX shared memory, but it doesn't say you
can't use it as a ramdisk. The relevant code is in mm/shmem.c

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2001/debian-user-200110/msg03066.html