[Beowulf]Infrastruture planning for small HPC 40/100 gigabyet eyhernet or Infiniband?

[Nifty niftyompi Mitch]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 10:28:39PM -0700, MDG wrote:
> 
> 
.....
>    InfiniBand was declared all but dead  not too long ago and it has been
.....
> 
> > Fiber is a commodity.  Perhaps you were looking for pricing close
> > enough to twisted pair copper? In any case, it's not just the cost per
> > length of cable, the endpoints for fiber are also more expensive.
> 
> Right now you need GBICs, a splicing cassette, and a splicer
> (a 10 k$ device). The future looks very bright for polymer fiber,
> which can be processed with a simple sharp knife (100 MBit/s
> Ethernet kits + converters are reasonably cheap, 1 GBit/s
> is being developed -- 10 GBit/s might be rather challenging,
> unless there's photonic crystal technology).

Did I read this correctly? 
Are you cutting holes in the walls of a home.....?

It seems to me that today's 'exotic' links should be confined
to the machine room/ data closet.   Consider the current
maximum length of Infiniband DDR over Cu ....

After that you can look at end point bandwidth to an office or
entertainment room.   It is not hard or expensive to pull high quality
TV coax which can support multiple HDTV links and multiple cat6 for
trunked data links leaving the machine room.

Also all wires in the wall MUST be safety rated for such use.



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Looking for a place to hang my hat.