[Cialug] Cluster

[David Champion]

Chris Hilton wrote:
> 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.
>>
> 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.

The Netgear PCI gigabit ethernet cards are about $30 retail, and in 
comparisons (this was a year ago or so...) benchmark about the best of 
the PCI gigabit on copper cards.

But... like the previous poster says, it probably all depends on what 
you're doing, and for your experimentation 100mbit would probably be fine.

-dc