[Beowulf] Infiniband Support ?

[John Hearns]

Amjad,
I agree with what Andrew says - you can buy some very powerful single
motherboard systems these days.


I would suggest two things though:

a) if you are planning to use this cluster for learning about MPI and
cluster interconnects why not get some gigabit ethernet cards plus a
gigabit switch?

b) Look for second hand Infiniband cards and a switch on eBay.
    Or look at  Colfax Direct sell  http://www.colfaxdirect.com

I saw one of these rather nifty eigght port switches from Mellanox at Cloud
Expo in London:

http://www.colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=601&idcategory=7

Sweet!
Or even easier the twelve port version:
http://www.colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=1819&idcategory=7






On 26 May 2014 12:58, Andrew Holway <andrew.holway at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This cluster is now a little bit ancient. I have a feeling that, for the
> price of upgrading your network to Infiniband (around $10000 for QDR), you
> could buy a single, dual socket server that will be more powerful. The pcie
> bus on those systems is PCIe x8 Gen1 which would halve the speed anyway.
> You could *maybe* find old DDR IB on ebay or similar.
>
> What kind of application are you running on the cluster? is it connected
> to any kind of storage system?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew
>
>
>
> On 26 May 2014 11:50, amjad ali <amjad11 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Dear All,
>>
>> We have a small cluster of 16 nodes (single socket) with Intel S3210SH
>> motherboards. Does it fully support to connect these nodes with infiniband
>> switch and also installing the relevant iniband host adapter/interface
>> cards?
>>
>> Is it worth to add such an high speed interconnect for such a general
>> purpose cluster?
>>
>> If there is no support possible with infiniband then can we plan for any
>> other high speed interconnect technology like Myrinet, Quadrics etc.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Amjad Ali
>>
>>
>>
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