Re: [RFC] mount flag "direct" (fwd)

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@clusterfs.com>]

On Sep 03, 2002  23:07 +0200, Peter T. Breuer wrote:
> You don't really want the whole rationale. It concerns certain 
> european (nay, world ..) scientific projects and the calculations of the
> technologists about the progress in hardware over the next few years.
> We/they foresee that we will have to move to multiple relatively small
> distributed disks per node in order to keep the bandwidth per unit of
> storage at the levels that they will have to be at to keep the farms
> fed.  We are talking petabytes of data storage in thousands of nodes
> moving over gigabit networks.
> 
> The "big view" calculations indicate that we must have distributed
> shared writable data.
> 
> These calculations affect us all. They show us what way computing
> will evolve under the price and technology pressures. The calculations
> are only looking to 2006, but that's what they show. For example
> if we think about a 5PB system made of 5000 disks of 1TB each in a GE
> net, we calculate the aggregate bandwidth available in the topology as
> 50GB/s, which is less than we need in order to keep the nodes fed
> at the rates they could be fed at (yes, a few % loss translates into
> time and money).  To increase available bandwidth we must have more
> channels to the disks, and more disks, ... well, you catch my drift.
> 
> So, start thinking about general mechanisms to do distributed storage.
> Not particular FS solutions.

Please see lustre.org.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/