gige benchmark performance

[Mark Hartner]

> taking a look at your graphs, we might want to tweak our kernel a little,
> because our netgears with the acenic chipset do not perform nearly as
> well.

We found that network performance varied greatly with motherboard
chipset. I have a comparison of an 840 chipset system with an 860 chipset
system at:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hartner/cluster/cluster.html

The 840 chipset system had a peak bandwidth of about 400Mbits/sec, whereas
the 860 chipset system had a peak bandwidth of about 500Mbits/sec. I
literally took the drive out of the first system to test the second
system, so the only difference was the MB chipset and CPU. Our performance
tests were not CPU bound, which leads us to believe that it is the MB
chipset that made the difference.

Mark