While looking into some reports of less-than-desired performance from the scratch space, we have found and addressed some issues. We were able to enlist the help of a support engineer from Panasas, who helped us identify a few places to improve configurations. These were applied last week, and we expect to see improvements in read/write speed.
If you notice differences in the scratch space performance (positive or negative!) please let us know by sending a note to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.