How can I improve I/O performance?

[Roger Grev]

Hi, I'm posting this from a friend's account, so don't blame him.

We just bought some RS/6000 530's to run quantum chemistry codes and,
while I can't complain about the cpu speed, the I/O leaves much to be
desired.  The problem is that we need to do a huge amount of I/O
(scratch files on the order of several hundred megabytes are standard),
so what winds up happening is I'm in iowait about 68% of the time.
I've tried moving the /usr files to the edge of the disk to try and get
more tmp space in the center (that's what info explorer says to do),
but that doesn't do squat!  Is there any equivalent to tunefs on 
these things?  Is there anything obvious I'm missing, or am I doomed
to a life of low productivity?  Any thoughts would be greatly
appreciated.  Please respond to splunge at ccqc.bitnet.

Thanks in advance,

Ed Seidl


-- 
Hey, I just work here.
Roger Grev                rgrev at ccqc.bitnet