[Beowulf] Re: torus versus (fat) tree topologies

[john.brookes at quadrics.com]

> 	from looking at list prices on the web, Myrinet, IB and
> Dolphinics have similar per-port prices which are noticably lower than
> Quadrics but also dramatically higher than gigabit.  I suspect most
> people would agree that Quadics is a latency specialist, at least for
> not purely nearest-neighbor applications.  OTOH, for cheap nodes, you
> 


Sorry to get all 'marketing' on all of you, but i can no longer ignore this all-too-common misconception. Here is not the place for pricelists, but general assumptions about Quadrics' pricing are innaccurate for 2 reasons:
1) no-one takes into account the lower pricing on the E-series (up to 128 nodes)
2) we've previously specialised in the upper echelons of the top500 (on the basis of our latency), meaning that people erroneously (we're fat-tree - extra layers of network step-change the per-port cost at certain barriers) evaluate our per-port cost based on huge machines.

i believe we are a bargain in the 2-128 range - at the very least competitive, at many points cheap. check it out and make your own minds up.

jb (standard disclaimers)

Quadrics