[Beowulf] Multiple NIC on a node

[Peter St. John]

Mark,
I don't get it? I would have thought that if a large package were split
between two NICs with two cables, then assuming the buffering and
recombination at each end to be faster than the transmission, then the
transmission would be faster than over a single cable? You don't mean that
the router must be a bottleneck, by giving necessarily only one pathway to a
pair of IPs?
Probably I'm missing something about what is would be meant by "(merely)
aggregate bandwidth"?
Thanks,
Peter

On Jan 8, 2008 11:40 AM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> > So, if your application does a great deal of file I/O on the nodes, you
> > might consider implementing a service network through the second network
> > ports.
>
> this is convenient, since if you use two nics with different subnets,
> traffic will be segregated and non-interfering.
>
> > However, if your application needs more total bandwidth on a
> > single network, you will want to go with channel bonding. If the
>
> besides being slightly trickier to configure, it also only gives you
> higher _aggregate_ bandwidth.  any single flow between a pair of IPs
> will not be faster than a single link.  bonding/teaming/link-aggregation
> is mainly useful for inter-switch links and hosts like a fileserver
> which are effectively a hotspot and can take advantage of multiple
> concurrent flows (again, where each flow is no faster than 1 link.)
>
> in other words, there's no standard "raid0 of nics" ;)
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