[Beowulf] Re: torus versus (fat) tree topologies

[Craig Tierney]

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 05:50, Dan Kidger wrote:
> On Saturday 20 November 2004 9:53 pm, Pfenniger Daniel wrote:
> >  > I could not however easily find a complete list of Infiniband price
> >  > anywhere. Most all vendors I tried require requesting a quote. Does
> >  >anyone have a nice online source for such pricing?
> >
> > Googling gave a German site with clear prices:
> > http://www.olmos.de/infini.html?lang=en&tax=no&xtra=&currency=USD
> >
> > The cost of 24 port switches has decreased by more than a factor 10
> > with repect to list prices of a defunct InfiniBand company 20 months ago,
> > without taking the falling USD into account.
> 
> I believe that currently Myrinet (revE) is more expensive than Quadrics, but I 
> thought that Infiniband was now often cheaper than Quadrics. However this 
> German website seems to contradict this view?

If you just consider list price, the Myrinet-E NIC is the same
price as the Quadrics NIC (~$1000).  Quadrics switching is a bit
more expensive.  For Myrinet you can build up to a 256 node system
where the per port cost is about $625.  For Quadrics, you can
build up to a 128 node cluster for $800-$900 per port.  Double the
cost of the Myrinet for a 1024 node system.  Triple the cost
for a 1024 Quadrics node system.  

Of course this is all list, and you really shouldn't be paying that.

Most of the Infiniband vendors I have talked to are pricing their
equipment to be cost competitive with Myrinet PCIX-D systems.  Some
have different ideas of what their value add is for commodity 
hardware, but those who get the HPC market are trying to take 
Myricom's market to start.

I don't have exact pricing for Infiniband but I wouldn't pay
more than $1000 per port for a complete system (card/cables/switches)
for a large system (requiring more than 1 switch).  If vendor
A won't do it, just go ask vendor B.

Craig 

>      Can someone on the list who understands Voltaire's products, say how much 
> an Infinband switch for a 128node cluster would cost?   It is an ISR-9288 
> ($29,950) with four sLB-24 cards ($10,950 each) = $73,750 or am I missing 
> something ?





> 
> As for the other components; Voltaire, Quadrics and Myricom(revE) cards all 
> cost pretty much the same. cables costs are almost identical (remembering 
> revE uses 2 cables per node). All three vendors have free open-source 
> drivers, libraries and MPI.
> 
> 
> Daniel.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. Dan Kidger, Quadrics Ltd.      daniel.kidger at quadrics.com
> One Bridewell St., Bristol, BS1 2AA, UK         0117 915 5505
> ----------------------- www.quadrics.com --------------------
> 
> 
> 
> 
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