[Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations

[Kozin, I (Igor)]

Joshua, no need for excuses.
I hope others on the list will agree that all information 
about reliable switches (as any good practice regarding 
clusters for that matter) is being read with high interest.
A positive post might not get a lot of feedback but
can be still extremely useful to many.

Igor

> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org 
> [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]On
> Behalf Of Joshua Baker-LePain
> Sent: 21 April 2006 00:26
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations
> 
> 
> On Thu, 6 Apr 2006 at 12:06pm, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Responding to myself one last time, I've put the switch (SMC8748L2) 
> through some more testing, and I'm pretty happy with it.  I set up 
> increasing numbers of node pairs firing netperf at each other, and 
> compared netpipe runs as the switch load increased.  
> Unfortunately, node 
> count limited me to 24 netperf instances (50% load only), but 
> the switch 
> didn't even blink:
> 
> http://www.duke.edu/~jlb17/np-comp.png
> 
> All that testing was done with jumbo frames.  I've put the 
> cluster back 
> into production, but if there's something in particular 
> someone would like 
> to see, let me know and I'll see if I can do it.
> 
> -- 
> Joshua Baker-LePain
> Department of Biomedical Engineering
> Duke University
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