On 10 Apr 2006, at 7:44 pm, Andrew D. Fant wrote: > > This does beg a question. Do your users do all their GUI-work and > Visualization > over the network and run those software packages on the head node? > I'd love to > have the cluster with isolated storage and such, but I've been > trumped by > administrative policy. There isn't a great deal of graphical work going on, to be honest. Those people that are running GUI applications (sequencing finishers running ACeDB, gap4, dotter etc, and microarray people running BioConductor stuff) are generally running them on tight-ish coupled Tru64 clusters using a cluster filesystem, and displaying to their desktop X server, so yes, they are running on the head node, but the head node is usually actually pretty meaty, at least as far as its I/ O capabilities are concerned. We're not planning to change this idea radically, but building similar architectures out of open source components is an interesting exercise. There are various bits and pieces which can provide much of what TruCluster does on Tru64 (heartbeat instead of CAA, and Lustre or GPFS instead of AdvFS/CFS, for example) but they're not as mature. Tim