Giganet vs. Myrinet vs. gigabit

[Patrick Geoffray]

Donald Becker wrote:

> > 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.

Don is right, do not expect significant difference between Myrinet 
and GigE for NFS on 32 nodes. Be very carefull with PCI performance 
on the Sun server, it may be the real bottleneck in your context.

There is also the price argument, and 32 nodes is roughly the 
cross-over between GigE and Myrinet cost model.
Look and compare :-)

Patrick

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