High Speed Beowulf Cluster using gigabit ethernet

[Ole W Saastad]

Ad. GBE interconnect.
 
Have you tested your applications with gigabit ethernet ?

The latency with GBE and fast ethernet are almost the same,
and while you get much higher bandwidth (not 100 MB/sec, unfortunately)
but substantially more than with 100 fast ethernet, the latency
is still a showstopper for many applications.

GBE is still relatively expensive and you might be better of spending
your extra money on  more nodes or a high performance interconnect.

If your applications are sensitive to latency you get a large gain
in performance when changing to an interconnect with low latency.

SCI is such an interconnect with bandwidths over 300 MB/sec and a
latency of less than 4 us.


-- 
Ole W. Saastad, Dr.Scient.
Scali AS P.O.Box 150 Oppsal 0619 Oslo NORWAY 
Tel:+47 22 62 89 68(dir) mailto:ole at scali.no http://www.scali.com 
SCALI - Scalable Linux Systems - Affordable Supercomputing