Myrinet vs. Dolphin

[Greg Lindahl]

> We have 8 nodes
> now, and can go up to 16 nodes with our current switch, but past that,
> Myricom says we would need one additional switch to get up to 18 nodes
> and two additional switches to get up to 24.

The best thing to do is to buy one of their new scalable switches; you buy a
backplane into which you can plug in 2, 8, or 16 "line cards", each of which
supports 8 hosts. It's significantly cheaper than buying separate 16-port
switches.

> I know they have there $40,000
> Millionare-in-a-box, I mean network-in-a-box "solution", but really who
> wants to waste that much money (if I just need even 32 nodes).

Apparently they did a bad job explaining how scalable in $$ that switch is.

-- greg