Scyld and Myrinet (Was: Distribution)

[Donald Becker]

On 8 Dec 2000, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:

> >>>>> "DB" == Donald Becker <becker at scyld.com> writes:
> 
> DB> We've demoed the Scyld distribution on CS20 nodes (albeit without
> DB> automatic installation of the boot scheme), and adding Myrinet to the
> DB> distribution was only a few weeks of integration and initial testing.
> DB> But we had prior experience with Myrinet.
> 
> Has that Myrinet work appeared in a released version of the distro?  I'd
> like to experiment with it, but I've been holding off because we have
> Myrinet (and Myrinet is odd enough with it's resource sharing issues that I
> doubt I'm able to hack on it myself).

Myrinet support is currently only in the custom distribution versions.

We will likely slip it into the low-cost ("preview") distribution at some
point.  We know that the testing and support effort is much higher than with
the well-tested fast Ethernet version, so we will continue to provide
Myrinet support only with the high-end package.

> I suppose we could always run TCP over it, but of course that has
> significant performance drawbacks.

Myrinet provides an IP network interface.  While some applications will
prefer to use a Myrinet library for application communication, the
"housekeeping" traffic will use the TCP/IP layer.  A neat feature of our
internal version is that it's possible to have Myrinet as the only network
interface, and the cluster installation and administration is unchanged from
the Ethernet version.

Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993