[Beowulf] SW Giaga, what kind?

[John Hearns]

Ruhollah Moussavi Baygi wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> 
> 
> Please let me know your idea about SW level1 (Giga). Is it a proper choice
> for a  small Beowulf cluster?
> Any suggestion would be highly appreciated.
> 
Yes, a small Beowulf cluster will work very well with Gigabit Ethernet.
My advice would be to not use desktop type systems,
but to specify 1U chassis based server systems.
Server motherboards generally have two on-board gigabit ethernet ports.
You can use one port for the general cluster traffic and NFS mounts,
and the other one is dedicated to MPI traffic.

For future expansion, you have the capability to fit Infiniband or 
Myrinet cards for lower latency if your applications need this.
But start with gigabit.


-- 
      John Hearns
      Senior HPC Engineer
      Streamline Computing,
      The Innovation Centre, Warwick Technology Park,
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