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Pawsey currently has two classes of "front-end" nodes, one group, usually referred to as "login" nodes, which are designed for the submitting of jobs and editimg of files, and a second group, usually referred to as "data-mover" nodes, which have higher-speed connectivity to various Pawsey storage systems than the "login" nodes, and which are thus recommended as the group of nodes from which to perform any data transfer operations, both within Pawsey, and when moving data into, or out of, Pawsey.
In order to try and ensure that "front-end" node responsiveness isn't slowed down by having too many of our users on one "login" or "data-mover" node at the same time, Pawsey, in common with many other supercomputing centres, operates a system whereby users are encouraged to connect to a generic name for the service, "login" or "data-mover", which allows for a mechanism, known as "DNS round-robin", to transparently redirect the user's connection to one of a group of nodes, and so balance the load across the group.
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