Giganet vs. Myrinet vs. gigabit

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, farul ghazali wrote:

> Subject: Giganet vs. Myrinet vs. gigabit

> Anyone have experience with these high speed network devices? I'm
> starting out with a 32 node cluster doing bioinformatics. The jobs will
> be high I/O probably through NFS, thus the need for some high speed
> connectivity between the nodes. I'm looking for stability and possibly
> cross platform use since the NFS server may have to go to either our
> large SGI or Sun server.

Gigabit Ethernet is well supported on all platforms.

Myrinet is lower latency, and scales efficiently to larger network
sizes.  However if you are using primarily NFS on a 32 node cluster you
won't see an advantage.  Myrinet has good Sun support, but you should
research how well it will work with your specific SGI system.

Giganet is apparently being repositioned by Emulex as a niche product.
In an interesting move, Emulex is instead promoting a programmable
gigabit Ethernet adapter as a SCSI-over-IP host channel adapter.
    http://wwwip.emulex.com/ip/index.html

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