[Beowulf] 10gig summary

[Greg Lindahl]

As an aside, remember 3 years ago when I was predicting that 10gigE
was going to arrive more slowly and much more expensively than
predicted? Anyway...

For a cheap layer-2 switch, the options seem to be:

Quadrics TG201, 24 port CX4. This was the least expensive. No public
pricing, but you can quickly get quotes from Quadrics or one of their
resellers.

Fujitsu XG700, 12p CX4, sells for $7,000-$8,000, pricing is public and
it's carried by places like CDW.

The Fujitsu XG2000 likewise is easily available, it's $13,000 for the
16 CX4 + 4 XFP model.

The Force10 S2401 24p CX4 was by far the most expensive, and took the
longest to get a quote (a "high touch" sales process, yuck.) They did
offer me a deeper discount when I mentioned Quadrics' pricing. So if
you really want this one, you know what to do.

A few months ago I actually tried to get Arastra to tell me what I
needed to use their switch with CX4, and they were completely
unhelpful.

Humorously, Myricom's ethernet-conversion blade, which goes into their
big non-ethernet switches, is not that much more expensive than the
above switches. That shows how high pricing is right now. All these
ethernet switches are essentially a single piece of silicon that costs
less than $500. So I'd expect the complete switch to be closer to
$3,000 than $13,000. Both Myricom and the InfiniBand players have much
lower margins than 10gigE. All hail the power of the commodity market!

-- greg