Alteon ACEnic card

[Val Henson]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 10:38:44AM -0500, Gary Stiehr wrote:
> Hi,
> 	We are looking at Alteon's ACEnic card for use in our cluster.  I was
> wondering what people's experiences have been with the performance of
> Alteon ACEnic cards.  Which switches do you use with the cards?  Do you
> take advantage of the "jumbo frames?"  Any information would be helpful.

I'm not using the acenic in a cluster environment, in fact, I'm only
using it in back-to-back configurations.  My experience with it has
been mostly good.  It does take at least two processors to drive this
card at any reasonable speed.

I'm using them primarily in jumbo frame mode (9000 byte MTU).  The
Linux acenic driver has a bug that will oops the machine if you change
the mtu too many times.  I sent Jes Sorensen a rudimentary patch but
as of version 0.46 he hasn't integrated it.

My measured bandwidth on two-cpu machines running Linux 2.2.16, with
default tuning and 9000 byte MTU, tops out at 615 Mbps.  I'm sure this
could be increased with a little bit of work.

The Alteon AceNIC's are the most expensive Gigabit Ethernet cards by
far, so we're buying some of the cheaper versions for evaluation.  For
some unofficial gige NIC prices, see:

http://www.tdl.com/~netex/network/network.html

Unfortunately, no one seems to have them in stock at the moment...

-VAL