Giganet vs. Myrinet vs. gigabit

[Greg Lindahl]

> Anyone have experience with these high speed network devices? I'm
> starting out with a 32 node cluster doing bioinformatics. The jobs will
> be high I/O probably through NFS, thus the need for some high speed
> connectivity between the nodes.

Note that if you aren't using NFS, the answer can be very different.
Let's say, for example, that instead of reading your databases via
NFS, you copy them to your local disk using the "gmcp" program (which
doesn't exist yet, but it works like rcp, only it uses gm). "gmcp"
should have much lower overhead than NFS or rcp, so your networking
might stop being the bottleneck, and instead your disks could be the
bottleneck.

As for systems actually using GM over NFS in production, the FSL
system in Boulder does. Craig Tierney got it working, and I think
they're happy with the stability.

greg