[Beowulf] Re: building a new cluster

[Glen Gardner]

I am not familiar with infiniband, but if you have a switch with both 
infiniband and ethernet, I suspect you can probably do okay with it. You 
just have to realize that the 100 MBit network is not as fat a paipe as 
infiniband. So when the infiniband network wants to talk to the 
ethernet, that transaction is going to be slow.

Recently I needed to connect a couple of gigabit ethernet macines to 
multiple fast ethernet machines, and ended up building a concentrator 
out of cheap gigabit switches so that the gigabit bandwidth was more or 
less usable. I picked up a little latency, but it was still an 
improvement over plugging the gigabit nodes straight into a fast 
ethernet switch.


Michael Lodico K1EG wrote:

>That might be a solution. But we also want to chain our current old
>cluster (based on 100 Mbps ethernet switch) into the new cluster. Will
>that be a problem (Infiniband + Ethernet)?
>
>SCH
>
>I would think that combining the two you are going to limit the system
>to 100 Mbps plus you could start getting data clashes from the faster IB
>which could slow down the network even more.
>
>Michael Lodico
>
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-- 
Glen E. Gardner, Jr.
AA8C
AMSAT MEMBER 10593



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