Hello, I have a large collection of files on a computer (tallgrass) and tallgrass is running an ftp server, which I have the username and password to. There is about 600 GB of files on tallgrass that I need access to, but I don't have a big enough hard drive. I need these data files to run a cpu-intensive calculation, and my CPU is significantly better than tallgrass' cpu, which is why I want to do it on my computer. (Tallgrass also doesn't have enough RAM.) What I would like to do is create a "symbolic link" on my hard drive that will point to the directory containing the data on tallgrass. Read-only is perfectly OK. This way I could read from mylink/data0001.dat and it would read from the file data0001.dat over ftp from tallgrass. I shouldn't have any speed issues because tallgrass is on my 1 Gbps LAN. Is there a way I can do this? Thanks.

If you do a web search for "ftp filesystem" you'll see many hits for it. I haven't used any so can't recommend one but this is what I would explore if I wanted to try what you are requesting.

If performance is your issue though, I think you're not going to be happy with any such solution as network bandwidth is apt to become your bottleneck rather than processing speed.

Normally you mount network drives to some folder. Something like this. http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-mou...in-ubuntu.html

I'd consider nfs also.