[Beowulf] GPFS on Linux (x86)

Patrick Geoffray patrick at myri.com
Thu Sep 14 22:00:58 PDT 2006


Greg Lindahl wrote:
>> If, however, you are considering something faster than gigabit  
>> Ethernet, bear in mind that GPFS only can use TCP (as far as I know).  
> 
> The July 2006 presentation posted to the list about the same time as
> your email says they're adding IB protocols in the future. I thought
> that GPFS used to support GM directly?

Never did, AFAIK. For a while, I though it used UDP, but I was mistaken.

> This is debatable. It is often the case that a large cluster does big
> I/O (say 10+ GB/s) on so many nodes (1000+) that individual nodes are
> doing < 100 MB/s. In that case the TCP overhead is not that large.

Well, there is always this case where the storage nodes are very 
oversubscribed to save enough to pay for the service contract :-\

Patrick
-- 
Patrick Geoffray
Myricom, Inc.
http://www.myri.com



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