From andresfc at ideam.gov.co Mon Feb 21 14:38:57 2000 From: andresfc at ideam.gov.co (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Andr=E9s?= Felipe =?ISO-8859-1?Q?CALDER=D3N?=) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 17:38:57 -0500 Subject: 3Com o Cisco Switch: What is the best choice ? Message-ID: <38B1BE81.2070204@ideam.gov.co> Hi, We're building a beowulf cluster, connected like the ANUWulf cluster (a FNN case, http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Beowulf). Each machine have 3 EEPro cards, the nodes are divided in four groups, A switch connects all nodes in one group with all nodes in another (for a total of 6 switches). Our providers offer two options. 6 switches Cisco Catalyst 3548 XL Enterprise Edition (48Ports 100/10 + 2 slots 1000BaseTX). or, 12 switches 3Com SuperStack? 3 Switch 3300 XM (24 Ports) , our provider said that the switches can be stacked together using a matrix cable for two units (what does "stack using a matrix cable" mean?) What is the best choice, 6 Cisco switches or a 2x6 3Com switches? Thanks in advance, - Andres From award at andorra.ad Sun Feb 27 01:24:46 2000 From: award at andorra.ad (Alan Ward) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 10:24:46 +0100 Subject: four-tier applications (was re: WinNT/Linux) References: Message-ID: <38B8ED5E.EFEB3AF8@andorra.ad> I also had the problem of integrating data on Linux boxes with users on Windoze. I use: - apache as a front-end for postgreSQL, through the PHP scripting language. Can't see why you couldn't use PHP to parse plain-text files dumped by your calculation. - a small graphical Java front-end for other kinds of programs, through a direct socket-to-socket connection. The nice part with both HTML and Java is that there are enough programmers out there (e.g. my students) who know them well enough to fiddle with font-end issues, giving ME time to fiddle with the gory innards of the system. Cheers, Alan Ward