MPI's on two NIC clusters

[Joachim Worringen]

Slick . wrote:
> 
> Couple of questions,
> 
> 1. Does channel bonding(kernel patch) take care of MPI's for two NIC beowulf architectures ? Or do i need to do something else ?

If the two NICs appear as one network device, you should be ready to go. 

> 2. Is MP_lite better than MPI in terms of performance ? or is it application dependent ?

It depends on the MPI implementation and the network, also on the memory
bandwidth of the system, and for a minor part on the CPU speed. A good
MPI-implementation will add very little overhead to the raw network
delay. The MPI-implementation on top of SCI that I have developed
(SCI-MPICH) approximates 100% of the raw SCI bandwidth for large
messages, and adds less then 3us latency for small messages, while
giving full, unrestricted MPI semantics. YMMV for other MPI
implementations. 

I wouldn't bother with MP_lite if a decent full MPI implementation is
available for the plattform.

 Joachim

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|  _  RWTH|  Joachim Worringen
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