Mark Hahn
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:00:00 -0700
If you need 144 ports a single switch will be be more cost effective
you'd think so - larger switches let you factor out lots of separate little power supplies, etc. not to mention transforming lots of cables into compact, reliable, cheap backplanes. but I haven't seen chassis switches actually wind up cheaper.of course, IB hardware prices seem to be extremely fuzzy (heavily discounted from list).
than a gaggle of 24 ports gathered together into a tangled hairy cable ball with 144 ports exposed.
once very nice thing about the leaf/trunk fat-tree approach is that yourswitches can be distributed in node racks. so any individual rack has a fairly managable bundle of cables coming out of it.
Your point about "most people don't need" is important! With large multi core, multiple socket systems external and internal bandwidth can be interesting to ponder.
that makes it sound like inter-node networks in general are doomed ;) while cores-per-node is increasing, users love to increase cores-per-job. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf