[Beowulf] building Infiniband 4x cluster questions

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Nov 7, 2011, at 5:50 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

>>>> DRIVERS:
>>>> Drivers for cards now. Are those all open source, or does it  
>>>> require
>>>> payment? Is the source released of all those cards drivers, and do
>>>> they integrate into linux?
>>>> You should get everything you need from the Linux kernel and /  
>>>> or OFED.
>>
>> You can also find the drivers on the vendors sites. Not sure about  
>> the rest, but for the Mellanox case it is open source and free -  
>> both for Linux and Windows
>>
>
> I bought some Supermicro systems about a year ago (maybe new than  
> that),
> with newer Mellanox cards( Mellanox Technologies MT26418 [ConnectX VPI
> PCIe 2.0 5GT/s - IB DDR / 10GigE). That aren't fully supported by the
> OFED that comes with RHEL/CentOS, not even version 6.1, so I had to
> download the latest Mellanox OFED to get them to work. I can confirm
> Gilad's statement that you can download them for free, they are 100%
> open source,  and you don't need to be a paying customer or  
> register on
> the Mellanox site, or any of that BS.

Yeah i saw that some websites charge money for that. I saw the  
Dolphin website wants $5000 for a
developer license or something vague. I call that 'download rights  
for the SDK'.

Sounds weird to me.

As for the MT26418 that's $562, that's factors too much for a low  
budget cluster that's low latency.

Another website i checked out was an Indian website: plx  
technologies. Seems in India.
However didn't allow me to register. For bandiwdth you don't need to  
check them out, as in some
webvideo i saw them speak about 600MB/s as if it was a lot, which is  
of course a joke even to old 4x infiniband,
which gets handsdown 800MB/s.

But for latency might not be bad idea. Yet didn't allow me to  
register that plxtechnologies, which is weird.

> Prentice
>
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