Size of pipe from beowulf to world

Sat Mar 3 11:08:41 PST 2001

Thanks for everyone's advice on our planned Beowulf (under the thread,
"Questions and Sanity Check").

I have another question that came up yesterday, as we were hashing out
more details: how large a pipe should there be from the Beowulf to the
outside world?  We were planning on having a single 100bT connection
from the head node out to the world, and 100bT from the head to the
switch, but realized that this could easily end up as a choke point.

We could replace one of the 16-port modules in our planned switch with
a 2-port Gbit ethernet module (one to the head, one to a fileserver,
most likely), but if that's not necessary, we'd rather not lose the
compute power.

Thanks for any advice,
Ray Jones
MERL