To Automount or to Not Automount?

[Jon Forrest <jlforrest-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>]

I run several Beowulf-style compute clusters
using CentOS 5. The question has come up of
whether having the compute nodes automount
needed filesystems is really necessary.
Using the automounter complicates other
aspects of configuring the cluster, but
the cluster software designers believe
that the benefits of automounting outweigh
the negatives.

In a Beowulf-style cluster there is a private
usually >= 1Gb/sec ethernet that handles the
NFS traffic. There are no routers involved.
If the network has problems that would cause
NFS to misbehave then the cluster as a whole
is probably in trouble. So, you can assume
a properly configured and functioning network.

So, I'd like to ask the NFS experts on this
list whether in a CentOS 5 environment with
NFS3 mounts over a functional private network,
would using static mounts result in any negatives
as compared to automounts. I'm especially interested
in overhead on the NFS server.

Cordially,

-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org