<div dir="ltr"><div>Mark, thanks for the heads up on those cards.</div><div>My kneejerk reaction was to question whether or not they would be any use, but that reaction is wrong.</div><div>This brings us back to the early days of Beowulfery - when people were using off the shelf, or even discarded,</div><div>equipmen to build clusters.</div><div>These cards seem to be marketed at the gaming/enthusiast market - indeed I did not even know that 5Gbps was a standard.</div><div>They would definitely find use for small home build clusters, or proofs of concept.</div><div>With the caveat that the drivers have to work as you you and Chris say.</div><div><br></div><div>The reviews make a big deal abotu Cat6 cabling and how expensive it is. Again I though that Cat6 was not at that much</div><div>of a premium over Cat5. Maybe in the home market it is.</div><div>Still, if it makes peope think about cable quality and routing cables properly it is a good thing.</div><div>Regarding switches, in my last job we got a D-Link 10Gbps switch for not much money. I never really benchmarked it in anger,</div><div>as it was more for provisioning tests over 10Gbps.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 17 May 2017 at 03:30, Christopher Samuel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:samuel@unimelb.edu.au" target="_blank">samuel@unimelb.edu.au</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span>On 17/05/17 07:25, Mark Hahn wrote:<br>
<br>
> the question, in my book, would be whether they could deliver decently<br>
> low latency (running MPI, Linux, open-source drivers on a commodity switch).<br>
<br>
</span>I'm guessing to do that they'd need some form of RoCE (RDMA over<br>
Converged Ethernet) support too, which I suspect needs switch<br>
support (seems to from my limited involvement with a Mellanox<br>
10/40/100 gigE cluster on campus).<br>
<br>
I was going to download the driver to take a look here:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.aquantia.com/driver-download/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://www.aquantia.com/<wbr>driver-download/</a><br>
<br>
but there's a restrictive set of terms for it which seem GPL<br>
incompatible to me, so I didn't proceed.<br>
<br>
There's a little bit on the card here too (plus comments):<br>
<br>
<a href="http://techreport.com/news/31904/aquantia-aqtion-nics-bring-5-gbps-ethernet-to-a-pcie-slot-near-you" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://techreport.com/news/<wbr>31904/aquantia-aqtion-nics-<wbr>bring-5-gbps-ethernet-to-a-<wbr>pcie-slot-near-you</a><br>
<br>
Best of luck!<br>
Chris<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">--<br>
Christopher Samuel Senior Systems Administrator<br>
Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne<br>
Email: <a href="mailto:samuel@unimelb.edu.au">samuel@unimelb.edu.au</a> Phone: <a href="tel:%2B61%20%280%293%20903%2055545" value="+61390355545">+61 (0)3 903 55545</a><br>
</font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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