[Beowulf] choosing a high-speed interconnect

[Mikhail Kuzminsky]

In message from "Michael T. Prinkey" <mprinkey at aeolusresearch.com> 
(Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:05:27 -0400 (EDT)):
>
>This won't help with your Opteron systems as they probably have 
>broadcom
>(tg3) NICs, but GAMMA has just released an update that supports Intel
>(e1000) gigabit cards:
>
>http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma/index.html
>
>They have an MPI implementation as well:
>
>http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma/mpigamma/index.html
We had some experience w/older GAMMA versions, but then we stopped
our using because of the absense of reliable SMP support and e1000 
cards we begun to use. Now e1000 is supported only for 2.6 kernels
(we are using 2.4 for x86_64). Latest pair of GAMMA versions for 2.4 
and 2.6 kernels is attractive and may give GAMMA "new life". 

But I'm afraid the instability of Intel Pro/1000 NICs in the sense of 
extremally often NIC chips exchange by Intel - between different NICs 
"version". GAMMA staff say about i82546 chipset; what will be for
other ?  

Yours
Mikhail Kuzminsky
Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
Moscow

>They claim vastly improved latency and incrementally improved 
>bandwidth on
>gigabit hardware relative to TCP/IP.  We are planning to test it with 
>the
>new Xeon cluster we will be building next month.  It will be 
>interesting
>to see how it fairs with LINPACK and the MFIX CFD code.
>
>Anyone given GAMMA a try?
>
>Mike
>