@Geoffrey Shelton Okot you're absolutely right! Thank you a lot. I was struggling to understand why I was loosing containers the first time I used "/fast_nfs/yarn/local (was getting "file not found" error messages) and then the tiredness made me think of using hdfs:/// instead...and I ended up sending this dumb question. My initial problem was caused by the fact that I was using the same NFS filesystem and path for all the nodes. After mounting /fast_nfs/nodeXXX/ on each node (where nodeXXX contains the yarn/local subdir) and adjusting permissions it worked perfectly (note that node1 gets /fast_nfs/node001 mounted as /scratch, node2 gets /fast_nfs/node002 mounted as /scratch and so on, so I'm using /fast_nfs as the NFS filesystem and mounting subdirs for each node..and defined yarn.nodemanager.local-dir as "/scratch/yarn/local") ... View more