CMSDS@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (David Stewart) (12/21/90)
I am interested in finding out about "clustered" IRISes, that is a group of IRISes within one logical group (lab). It is possible that we may be able to purchase a number of Personal Irises to go along with our existing 4D/70GT. My question is: Should we go with disks or diskless (they will be linked via FDDI). What experiences have others had with similar setups (even those not linked by FDDI). The boxes will be spread throughout at least 5 buildings (all linked by FDDI). We haven't had a lot of feedback from our regional sgi office about this (we consider ourselves very lucky if we can get quotes back from them within 2 weeks). The applications that we would run would be molecular-modeling based: SYBYL, AMBER, CHARMm, etc. Please send your comments to cmsds@uga.cc.uga.edu. Thank you in advance for your assistance, and Happy Holidays. David Stewart +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | David Stewart - University Computing and Networking Services | | Specialized Systems Support - (404) 542-5110 | | University of Georgia - Athens, GA | |---------------------------------------------------------------| | Internet: CMSDS@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU | Bitnet: CMSDS@UGA | | -or- STEWART%GANDAL.DNET@SERVER.UGA.EDU | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
mg@ (Mike Gigante) (12/21/90)
CMSDS@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (David Stewart) writes: > I am interested in finding out about "clustered" IRISes, that is >a group of IRISes within one logical group (lab). It is possible that >we may be able to purchase a number of Personal Irises to go along with >our existing 4D/70GT. My question is: Should we go with disks or >diskless (they will be linked via FDDI). What experiences have others >had with similar setups (even those not linked by FDDI). Well, we have 20 SGI machines in a single lab at the moment. It will split into a group of 10, another of 6 and the rest sprinkled around sometime next year. The server is a 220 (SMD), most of the PIs are currently diuskless but I have abandoned the diskless setup and have already ordered 200Mb system disks for most of them. In my opinion, a diskless PI is a bad idea. With the current setup (NeWS, the share tree, *symbolic* links fromn the client to share), the net traffic from diskless to server is just too high. (I put a sniffer on the net and watched the traffic). Login from a diskless is ridiculously slow (this should change once SGI go over to X right?). Paging across the net is also pretty slow. This is particularly bad if you have 8Mb PIs (I have upgraded all PIs to 16Mb) For example, if you have NeWS, Xsgi, 3 wsh, clock, you aready need to page!!!!! (SGI: please compile wsh with the shared library if it isn't now!!! It is ridiculously large for what it does...) This is not a flame, merely a comment based on 15 months experience with diskless. The incremental cost of a 200Mb system disk is *REALLY* worth it. I would like to emphasise the point *very* strongly. To be fair, a 16Mb PI with 3.3 is a much more usable diskless machine than the 8Mb 3.2 machine. However, now that disk prices have come down, the balance is definately in diskfull's favour. Mike Gigante RMIT Advanced Computer Graphics Centre
blbates@AERO4.LARC.NASA.GOV ("Brent L. Bates AAD/TAB MS361 x42854") (01/07/91)
I recommend that you should NOT go diskLESS. Have a disk big enough for all the OS files AND swap space. We have a file server and diskless clients. About 2 months ago, the file server went down for about a month, which put all our diskless workstations out of commission too. We are now in the process of putting disks on ALL the workstations. Each machine has all the standard OS files, swap space, and some scratch space. User files are on the file server. That way if the file server goes down we still have network access and get some work done. We are also in the process of considering a second file server. Half of the user files would reside on both machines, that way if one server goes down we still have one server, and important user files on the down machine can be put on the working server from back up's. Diskless clients are too costly in the long run. We found that out the hard way. Hope this helps. -- Brent L. Bates NASA-Langley Research Center M.S. 361 Hampton, Virginia 23665-5225 (804) 864-2854 E-mail: blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates@aero8.larc.nasa.gov