Myrinet scalability

Petter Gustad pegu at dolphinics.no
Mon Jun 17 05:26:35 PDT 2002


From: "Serguei Patchkovskii" <serguei.patchkovskii at sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: Myrinet scalability
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 10:53:38 -0400

> ----- Original Message ----- 
> Ole W. Saastad" <ole at scali.com> wrote:
> > with this talk about scalability and switches I would like to
> > point out that the SCI interconnect uses no switch.

Even though many SCI users don't use switches it's possible to build
switches based upon the SCI interconnect. Dolphin offers SCI based
switches¹.

> While this sounds more attractive than Myrinet in theory, the practice
> may (or may not) turn out to be a little bit different: The number of 

This is correct. It depends upon the product you start out with. If
you started out with the older 1D card you'll have to add the smaller
daughter card to your current interface or replace it with a single
slot 2D card to go to 2D. However, if you started out with a 8 node 3D
system (2x2x2) and expanded to a 27 node 3D system (3x3x3) the cost
would be linear.

Petter

¹) http://www.dolphinics.com/products/ms8x_bxbar.html



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