problems with 3com and intel 100MB cards

[Renato Silva]

Hi

We use 3Com cards with our 32 node cluste with channel bonding with no problems
Our default is the channel bonding using 2 cards, but we already used it with 3 cards
in the NAS benchmarks and they works well.

Good luck
Best regards

Renato Silva



Marcin Kaczmarski wrote:

>         Hello,
>
> I try to make calculations from materials science using parallel code
> with lam library. I use 6 athlon cluster connected with fast ethernet
> cards. I use 3com3c905c-tx cards with dual channel bonding connection.I
> use redhat linux with 2.4.x kernel and 3c59x driver. Everything works
> quite good but unfortunately I observed that my program (CPMD) simply
> dies without any info in logs (only confirmation from lam that process
> died and that`s all). I tried also intel eepro100 cards and with no
> channel bonding and the results are the same. I consulted this problem
> with some man from Germany who is admin of 60 pc cluster and also uses
> the same program - CPMD. I got the information from him that 3com and
> intel cards are very unreliable , they cannot bear extremely high
> network load. So are these cards only well suited for throwing them away
> to the basket? Do you possibly know how to solve such problem?
> I know about SCI dolphinics cards but they cost $1500 each. I also heard
> from the same man that the only one reliable 100 MB cards were that with
> dec tulip chip. However it seems that they are out of market. Especially
> after intel bought tulip chipset and did sth wrong with that. I`ve heard
> that many clusters run with smc etherpower cards (with tulip chipset)
> however I checked that smc has actually no card with tulip on market.
> I was also thinking about gigabit but first my channel bonding gives me
> almost  gigabit performance, second I use motherboards with viakt266a
> chipset and heard that it is very bad chipset and I don`t know if it
> really can handle gigabit card properly, third SCI dolphinics cards have
> very attractive prices while compared with reliable gigabit switches but
> still very high.
>
> I also heard about linux alpha clusters that fail to operate while
> running with 3com cards.
>
> Please give  some hint how to rebuilt the cluster in order to make it
> usable. Despite using epox cards with viakt266 chipset I have a
> confirmation that the problem is really primarily related to these
> network cards.
>
> Kind regards
> Marcin Kaczmarski
>
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