[Beowulf] Experience of using multiple network devices on a node in cluster

[Tony Travis]

John Hearns wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 11:10 -0700, Tajendra Singh wrote:
> 
>>Greetings!!
>>
>>Many of the vendors are providing two GigE ports by default on systems which
>>are being used as nodes in beowulf types of clusters.
>>
>>Is there anybody who tried connecting both the ports to the switch? I know
>>LA-MPI ( http://public.lanl.gov/lampi/) talks about utilizing multiple
>>network devices in real time, but did not get chance to experiment with it.
> 
> We have implemented clusters using one interface for parallel traffic
> (Score) and one for general purpose/NFS traffic.
> 
> This might be a better way for you to go.

Hello, John.

We also do this, but we use two separate network fabrics: One NIC 
connected to each fabric. This completely segregates the general/NFS 
traffic from the parallel IPC traffic. An advantage of this is that no 
matter how busy the cluster is, we can still control it because the 
parallel IPC traffic can't saturate the general/NFS network fabric.

This idea originally came from Edinburgh University's BOBCAT system:

	http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/bobcat

Best wishes,

	Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis,                     |  mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk
Rowett Research Institute,          |    http://www.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt
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