[HH] Has anyone seen a solution to this?

[Mark Komarinski]

> On Feb 14, 2016, at 4:21 PM, Kurt Keville <kurt.keville at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am looking at putting a cluster together, say 6 nodes with local 
> disk and 1 GigE network port... but instead of having them talk to the 
> head node via network I want the head node to have 6 connections 
> directly to the hard drives... I figure this would require some sort 
> of SATA pigtail in the client nodes, and a 6 node SATA card in the 
> head node, but is there a way to run an arbitrator on the head node 
> that won't interfere with the operation of the local disk, since the 
> nodes wouldn't necessarily know about the head node... this way I 
> remove the need to copy files to the head node via GigE...
>
> I know I can do parts of this independently... I have a couple of JBOD 
> boxes here and as long as I can just let the head node know it is a 
> read-only filesystem I might be in business... especially if I can 
> ensure that I am not doing head node reads at the same time as client 
> node writes...
>

Hi Kurt,

Rather than look at the solution you're proposing, I’d like to look at 
the problem and understand it.  What are you trying to solve?  It sounds 
like you have data on the head node that you’d like to get to the 
compute nodes but not go over the GigE port (why avid GigE?).  Do the 
compute nodes need to send data back to the head node?  Is it the same 
data on all 7 hard drives?

I’ve got a bunch of ideas on how you can solve this, but I don’t think 
that having multiple SATA cables per drive is the best way to go.

-Mark