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 -- ************************************************************* Dr. Jörg Saßmannshausen, MRSC University College London Department of Chemistry 20 Gordon Street London WC1H 0AJ email: [email protected] web: http://sassy.formativ.net Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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