[Beowulf] Building a new cluster - seeking some advice

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 10:06:14AM -0500, Thomas Carroll wrote:

> 2. Given my budget (about 20K), I plan on going with GigE on about 24
> nodes.  Am I right in thinking that faster network interconnects are
> just too expensive for this budget?

Wrong question. The right question: given my application, what network
gives me the most bang for my buck?

For such a small system, the answer is likely gigE; but, if your code
doesn't scale to 24 nodes with gigE, you'll have to think about
alternatives. There are codes and data set sizes at which gigE doesn't
scale.

-- greg