[Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 9:33am, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote

> On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 at 9:04am, Tim Mattox wrote
>
>> FYI - here are some links to a variety of 48-port commodity GigE switches,
>> that may be worth looking at (but as another poster indicated, these
>> might actually all be the same switch built by an OEM and just rebadged.
>> One can only really tell by opening one up and looking at the PCB and chips
>> that are inside.):
>> 
>> SMC8648T TigerSwitch
>> http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProductDetail&localeCode=EN_USA&pid=1192
>
> The SMC8748L2 I went with is here:
>
> http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?event=viewProduct&localeCode=EN_USA&pid=1498
>
> It's cheaper than the 8648T while apparently newer and with some "better" 
> specs.  As I mentioned before, I'm decidedly skeptical and intend to test it 
> hard while I'm still well within the return period.

I've got my new switch in hand and I've done some preliminary testing.  So 
far, so good.  Total bandwidth between 2 hosts connected to the switch was 
quite comparable to that of the hosts being directly connected for just 
about all the MTUs I tested (see 
<http://www.duke.edu/~jlb17/tg3comp.png>).  The hosts are centos 4.3 using 
onboard BCM5704 NICs (tg3 driver), and I tested with netperf.

Now I just need to get it hooked up to more hosts and really have at it.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University