[Beowulf] Gigabit PCI-E NIC

[Mark Hahn]

> As these computers will already have Broadcom NIC, should the second NIC
> also be Broadcom?  From a performance/stability point of view, does it

you need to question your assumption that you need two nics.
why do you think so?  when will a node have concurrent heavy file
and MPI traffic?  its possible, I suppose, but I don't see that on
my clusters.

> NIC?  I believe Intel GB NIC is already in the kernel and is a
> "favorite" amount clusters so I probably could not go wrong with Intel.

there are some intel-o-philes, though I suspect they got that way by 
being burned by transient problems with other nics.  we certainly have 
a large number of BCM57xx's in our systems, and I've never had any
problem specific to them.  we've also got some intel-based systems,
and they work fine as well.  I don't believe there are measurable 
differences in performance or overhead.  it would be interesting to 
try a really tight comparison (e1000 and tg3 cards, both presumably
1x PCI-e; all my hardware is integrated in either xeon or opteron 
systems, and thus not comparable...)

regards, mark hahn.