Sun/IRAF V2.11 Site Manager's Guide
Sun/IRAF V2.11 Site Manager's Guide
For an application such as programming or word processing, a diskless node
connected to a large file server is a cost effective approach delivering
good performance. Some local disk for boot, swap, and local file storage
is desirable but not essential. For most IRAF applications however, where
serious image processing is planned, one is inevitably going to want to
run large batch image processing jobs directly on the server, implying that
a compute rather than file server is what is needed (i.e., one
will want to avoid heavy NFS loading on the server). A diskless node is
still viable, but one will want to run jobs which involve heavy disk i/o
directly on the server, reserving the workstation for the interactive
things, e.g., graphics and image display, and compute bound image analysis
tasks. Small SCSI disks are getting cheap enough that almost any color
workstation equipped with say, 12-16 Mb of memory, probably warrants several
Mb of local disk for server independence, swap, and local file storage.