[Beowulf] Mellanox UFM question

[Novosielski, Ryan]

I use it. It works fine. opensm I believe it is called. UFM has other features that are supposed to be really nice and make monitoring for fabric problems really easy. It's definitely not required to have a working Infiniband setup.

____ *Note: UMDNJ is now Rutgers-Biomedical and Health Sciences*
|| \\UTGERS      |---------------------*O*---------------------
||_// Biomedical | Ryan Novosielski - Senior Technologist
|| \\ and Health | novosirj at rutgers.edu<mailto:novosirj at rutgers.edu>- 973/972.0922 (2x0922)
||  \\  Sciences | OIRT/High Perf & Res Comp - MSB C630, Newark
    `'

On Sep 15, 2015, at 13:31, Jörg Saßmannshausen <j.sassmannshausen at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:j.sassmannshausen at ucl.ac.uk>> wrote:

Hi Jeff,

no, not yet.
What I want to avoid is: I try the OFED subnet manager and it does not work
and then I have to wait until I get the licence. This project has enough
delays right now and I don't want to add to it. Hence my question.

Having said that: are you happy with the OFED one?

All the best

Jörg

On Dienstag 15 September 2015 Jeff Becker wrote:
Hi Jörg,

Have you tried using the subnet manager from Mellanox OFED (which is
free)? That's what we use on our big heterogeneous cluster at NASA.

HTH

-jeff

On 09/15/2015 08:55 AM, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:
Dear all,

I am a bit confused and I was wondering whether somebody on the list
could give me a bit of advice here.

I was previously using QLogic for my QDR InfiniBand network. I got one
master switch which got the licence for the InfiniBand installed and
things appear to work ok. At least I cannot detect any problems despite
adding switches and nodes to the fabric.

Now, we recently purchased a new cluster with 20 cores per node and here
I decided to go for FDR to be a bit more future proofed as well. So I
got the 'normal' licence from Mellanox for the cluster. I got one
licence per node so I assumed that was ok.

Now, we are in the process to set up another cluster with a mixture of
older and newer hardware. Again I have decided to opt for the FDR simply
to be a bit more future proofed. And this is where the confusion comes
in.

Apparently I do need now the UFM (Unified Fibre Manager) from Mellanox to
run the InfiniBand. However, the normal licence is only for up to 16
cores per node and I would need the more expensive exhanced licence.

From what I and a colleague of mine can see the UFM is nothing more than
the

requires subnet manager plus some diagnostic tools.

There are two questions here:

- do we really need the exhanced UFM licence or is that just a way to
make money?

- would the open source subnet manage work as well and would the open
source diagnostic tools be ok?

- why do I need to pay for a licence for each node? Somehow I cannot
recall having done that in the past.

Unfortunately, InfiniBand is not my strong side and thus I would
appreciate and advice here.

All the best from a meanwhile sunny London

Jörg



_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf at beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf


--
*************************************************************
Dr. Jörg Saßmannshausen, MRSC
University College London
Department of Chemistry
20 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AJ

email: j.sassmannshausen at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:j.sassmannshausen at ucl.ac.uk>
web: http://sassy.formativ.net

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
<signature.asc>
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org<mailto:Beowulf at beowulf.org> sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20150915/328ad2d5/attachment.html>