[Cialug] Cluster

[Chris Hilton]

Aaron Porter wrote:

>On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:00:49 -0600, Lee <leeh@csi-rics.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>What sort of interconnect should I be looking for. Is a fast 10/100 switch
>>all I really need. Or is the speed between the two just that... A matter of
>>preferred speed?
>>    
>>
>
>That's an incredibly subjective question. It all depends on the
>workload. If you're doing something (like SETI, rc5, etc) that uses a
>lot of cpu time for tiny little chunks of data input and output, than
>10/100 is probably ok, but for most real world applications
>(bioinformatics, rendering, etc) you're really going to want gigE (or
>better). A xeon or an opteron with a 64bit pci nic can flood a gigE
>pretty reliably.
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>  
>
You also have to account for latency and how that will affect your 
processes.  The general rule today, from my understanding, is that 
Gigabit on PCI is a MINIMUM.  And it's not unreasonable, most good 
motherboards are shipping with gigabit onboard now, and an intel gigabit 
card is very affordable, so are gigabit switches.
But as I understand if low latency is important, ethernet is the devil.
I have very little experience with this, most of what I'm saying is just 
regurgitation from meetings with a guy who does know what he's talking 
about.