[Beowulf] fast interconnects

[Gilad Shainer]

> Hey folks.
> Just got back from a High Speed Digital Interconnection Workshop and
some stuff of interest to cluster'ites..

> a) There's likely to be 10Gbps ethernet over ordinary cat 5e/6 cabling
soon. (Solarflare is one company working on it)

It is not a surprise, as you can run InfiniBand on cat 6 cables today.
There are several solution in the market that make it happened.  

> b) There's some interesting work from companies like Fulcrum on very
fast switches using asynchronous logic. Several vendors are pushing to
get (very
fast) Ethernet used as a replacement for processor/processor
interconnects and to replace things like Fiberchannel for I/O.  They
have an architecture that essentially routes with zero copy inside the
switch.  I can't remember the latency for the switch, but it's down in
the hundreds of nanoseconds area.
> c) for high speeds, circuit switching is where it's at, rather than
classic store and forward packet switching.
>
> James Lux, P.E.
> Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group Flight Communications
Systems Section Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213 4800 Oak
Grove Drive Pasadena CA 91109
> tel: (818)354-2075
> fax: (818)393-6875

Best regards,
Gilad.

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