[Beowulf] Re: switching capacity terminology confusion

[Rahul Nabar]

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Nifty Tom Mitchell
<niftyompi at niftyegg.com> wrote:

>
> The cluster itself needs very little in the way of special services and can be
> setup and managed as a homogeneous soft gooey center with a hard crusty
> outside.   A "simple" but fast switch with enough ports seems sufficient.
> NFS traffic (fast cascading funnel tree) can be different than say MPI traffic
> with all hosts communicating at the same time with all the neighbors (one big cross bar).
> Your cluster design may well shape your switch benchmark testing.

Yup, I guess we need to wait for a "simple computing" switch model for
HPC just like siilar offerings on the compute server side recently.
I've had not much success getting any significant discounts or
evaluation switches off my local Cisco Vendors. Now if only there are
any Cisco powers-that-be on this mailing list............ :-)

-- 
Rahul