Hi Dan,
On Thu, 20 May 2010, Dan Werthimer wrote:
one more note:
the SFP+ based NIC boards that myricom suggested won't work,
because roach I, ibob, bee2 all use CX4 connectors, not SFP+.
Yes, all available converters are Infiniband.
roach II will support SFP+ connectors, - it will also support CX4
and 10GbaseT connectors, because the 10Gbe/infiniband PHY's will be on
a mezzanine board, and hopefully the casper communitity will generate
several mezzanine boards with different connectors and protocols.
Not sure if mezzanine boards are a good idea since the fiber optics only
need some footprint on the board, one hour of work for PCB designer.
No current info about 10GbaseT, sounds more useful than CX4 but about
useless even in our small telescope to bring the signals down. Some
concern of RFI too, although some fiber optic converters are notorious for
generating it, too.
For your information:
At the moment I am involved in merging the Finnish supercomputer,
Australian/USA/Japanese correlators and the Indiana University distributed
file system into a working combination. Surprisingly tedious even to get
user accounts.
Anyway the Indiana University approach seems to be very promising but so
far the Lustre filesystem below seems to be kind of flaky and very
dependent on operating system versions. Some competing distributed
filesystem efforts are around but seem kind of less developed.
Cheers,
Jouko
