[Beowulf] Aquantia 1-2-5-10Gb nics?

[John Hearns]

Mark, thanks for the heads up on those cards.
My kneejerk reaction was to question whether or not they would be any use,
but that reaction is wrong.
This brings us back to the early days of Beowulfery - when people were
using off the shelf, or even discarded,
equipmen to build clusters.
These cards seem to be marketed at the gaming/enthusiast market - indeed I
did not even know that 5Gbps was a standard.
They would definitely find use for small home build clusters, or proofs of
concept.
With the caveat that the drivers have to work as you you and Chris say.

The reviews make a big deal abotu Cat6 cabling and how expensive it is.
Again I though that Cat6 was not at that much
of a premium over Cat5.  Maybe in the home market it is.
Still, if it makes peope think about cable quality and routing cables
properly it is a good thing.
Regarding switches, in my last job we got a D-Link 10Gbps switch for not
much money. I never really benchmarked it in anger,
as it was more for provisioning tests over 10Gbps.



On 17 May 2017 at 03:30, Christopher Samuel <samuel at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

> On 17/05/17 07:25, Mark Hahn wrote:
>
> > the question, in my book, would be whether they could deliver decently
> > low latency (running MPI, Linux, open-source drivers on a commodity
> switch).
>
> I'm guessing to do that they'd need some form of RoCE (RDMA over
> Converged Ethernet) support too, which I suspect needs switch
> support (seems to from my limited involvement with a Mellanox
> 10/40/100 gigE cluster on campus).
>
> I was going to download the driver to take a look here:
>
> http://www.aquantia.com/driver-download/
>
> but there's a restrictive set of terms for it which seem GPL
> incompatible to me, so I didn't proceed.
>
> There's a little bit on the card here too (plus comments):
>
> http://techreport.com/news/31904/aquantia-aqtion-nics-
> bring-5-gbps-ethernet-to-a-pcie-slot-near-you
>
> Best of luck!
> Chris
> --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>
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