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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!network.jyu.fi!marius!tt
- From: tt@marius.jyu.fi (Tapani Tarvainen)
- Subject: Re: clusters
- In-Reply-To: mario@cad4.lbl.gov's message of 5 Jan 1993 22: 46:44 GMT
- Message-ID: <TT.93Jan6150818@marius.jyu.fi>
- Originator: tt@marius.math.jyu.fi
- Sender: news@jyu.fi (News articles)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: marius.math.jyu.fi
- Organization: University of Jyvaskyla
- References: <BzFsCM.H5u@bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au> <42692@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> <28226@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
- Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 13:08:18 GMT
- Lines: 32
-
- In article <28226@dog.ee.lbl.gov> mario@cad4.lbl.gov (mario aranha) writes:
-
- >We have ~15 300/400's and ~10 700s. Any significant comments on
- >making a mixed-cluster out of these?
-
- I'd probably make two clusters of the lot -- two mixed clusters, not
- one 700- and one 300/400 cluster (even though that would save disk space):
- that way you can easily move machines from one cluster to another,
- like when one server is down. But even a single 25-machine cluster
- might not be a bad idea, depending on how they're used. You could
- start with that and split it if the server chokes.
-
- >Any stats on server swap vs. local swap ? Is local swap an order
- >of magnitude faster or what?
-
- It isn't necessarily much faster if the server isn't busy, and if the
- server has faster disks it may even be faster than local swap, but if
- 20+ machines swap to a single server they better have so much RAM they
- don't swap much ... A compromise is having several auxiliary swap
- servers, like one disk for every three machines, but even then heavy
- swapping may choke the lan. Then again the machines won't perform
- too well anyway if there is much swapping even with local disks,
- so it might be better to buy more RAM instead of disks, depending ...
-
- >Was told HP plans to replace clusters with NFS in the near future.
- >Is this true?
-
- Gack. I hope not. I'd much rather see the opposite, i.e., using the
- HP diskless protocol for inter-cluster file access: it is faster, more
- convenient with CDFs, and more reliable than NFS.
- --
- Tapani Tarvainen (tt@math.jyu.fi, tarvainen@finjyu.bitnet)
-