Size of pipe from beowulf to world

[Jared Hodge]

I would say the biggest choke point you have to worry about it from your
server to the nodes.  Assuming you'll launch all of your jobs from the
server (where you compiled them), it needs to have a pretty good link to
send the executables out to the nodes, update their information, and
collect the data.  As always, this depends on the applications you'll be
running, their communications overhead, and weather they're synchronous
or asynchronous (asynchronous don't all ask for information at the same
time usually).  A single 100bT connection to the world has been plenty
for us.  You just want to have a way for developers to log onto the
system and write their code their, or ftp file in, etc.

Good luck.

Ray Jones wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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-- 
Jared Hodge
Institute for Advanced Technology
The University of Texas at Austin
3925 W. Braker Lane, Suite 400
Austin, Texas 78759

Phone: 512-232-4460
FAX: 512-471-9096
Email: Jared_Hodge at iat.utexas.edu