22 Feb
2017
22 Feb
'17
7:04 a.m.
I got to thinking about the file system sync vs. order argument as a result
of this interesting discussion.
Back in NJ in 1998 I had a 144-node PC cluster. It started with 80 FreeBSD
nodes, and a few months later we add 64 Linux nodes. It was DARPA funded
and we were looking at issues around clustering.
What we discovered, when we added the Linux cluster, was that building
power was really terrible. We had not realized it with the freebsd cluster
because it tended to cleanly recover from unplanned nasty power cycles. But
the Linux cluster tended to always have a small number of nodes that did
not get through fsck.
yeah, it's not that good a data point maybe, but we found it interesting.