gig ether cards

[Mike Davis]

What gigabit cards are people running on their clusters? I have
Sykonnect on two machines, but what about intel?

We've had some residual issues with channel bonded FastEther. One issue
is that nodes will "get lost" even though we can reach the node by
serial, the switches cannot connect. For job on multiple nodes, I solved
this by pinging the nodes (I also discovered that the issue was rare
until jobs grew to 8p+). I solved the issue by pinging the nodes before
submitting. This often (though not always) reestablished links.

The problem was made worse by the installation of pvfs. Even with the
most recent version, we could not get dependable performance. We then
broke channel bonding but seemed to be experiencing pvfs errors at this
point caused by a lack of bandwith.

That brings me to the question above. I'm going to renetwork my 64p
cluster for GigEther. Any advice on cards would be greatly appreciated.

Mike Davis