[Bioclusters] Re: resources on administering clusters

[James Cuff]

> > > Set multiple swap partitions to the same priority
> > > 
> > > /dev/sda2	none	swap	sw,pri=3	0	0
> > > /dev/sdb2	none	swap	sw,pri=3	0	0
> > > /dev/sdc2	none	swap	sw,pri=3	0	0
> > > /dev/sdd2	none	swap	sw,pri=1	0	0

This is all good stuff, I'm really glad that the list has kicked off with
some good technical chit-chat.

This actually got me to thinking about the Linux software based RAID 0
sets that we have been using in our current blade evaluations (I'm planing
to report all our findings to the list once the bake offs are complete -
infact ChrisD will probably hold me to it... :->).  Currently, we are
seeing ca. 50% speed up on our tests, which I'm pretty happy about to be
honest.

The current DS10 farm we run uses AdvFS filesets balanced over two IDE
drives, but given that it is all at the file level so we don't really see
all that much performance improvement...

I guess my only question is whether anyone else used this type of software
RAID 0 on IDE in production farms before and are there any real gotchas,
tuning/tweaking or total nightmares I ought to be aware of?  I have enough
nightmares, and would like to keep them to a minimum :-)

Best regards,

J.

--
Dr. James Cuff
Group Leader - Informatics Systems Group
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223-494880  Fax: +44 (0) 1223-494919