The Coming of Diskless Clusters
With advances in many facets of networking, diskless clusters are now quite practical. Better yet, nodes without local storage are cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain. Here’s a survey of the relevant technologies and techniques.
Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
The world of clusters is fun and unique because there are so many ways to customize the design and implementation of your cluster. One design that’s becoming increasingly popular is the diskless cluster — that is a cluster with no hard drives in the compute nodes.
Diskless clusters are now practical to build, due to the convergence of several key technologies, including affordable, high-speed interconnects, high-speed network file systems and storage network protocols, MPI implementations with MPI-IO, and high- performance processors.
Why no hard drives in compute nodes? Removing storage hardware from each machine reduces cost, cuts down on noise, lessens cooling requirements, and curtails power consumption, and minimizes the number of moving parts in a cluster, thereby improving reliability. (Indeed, several studies indicate that hard drives are the least reliable component of cluster configurations.)
Where Did the Operating System Go?
One of the first questions asked about diskless clusters is, “Where is the OS for each node?”
