Myrinet vs. Dolphin

[Jason Holmes]

Sergiusz Jarczyk wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Bill Broadley wrote:
> [...]
> > You mention 4 1m cables?  Why 4?  The dolphin card has 2 ports requiring
> > 2 cables no?  Or can a single card be in 2 loops, i.e.  a matrix where
> > you have loops in the x and y directions.
> >
> > I've looked through the dolphin site and haven't found a good
> > description of the physical interface/possible topologies.
> >
> 
> No, Dolphin cards (known as Wulfkit - packaged with SCALI Software
> Platform) has 4 ports (two on board and two on doughter card). Possible
> topologies include 2D Torus and ring. In Torus (which is better than ring
> and allow to build clusters with some fault tolerance) each card is
> connected with four other (two in X and two in Y directions).

Not to mention that the newer cards will have 4 ports all on one card
(no daughterboard).  The 64/66 cards will be like this, at least (I'm
told these just went into production).  I'm not sure if the 32bit cards
with 4 ports that were shown to me when Dolphin came to visit are going
to be available or if they were just concept cards.  There was also talk
about maybe doing 4 port cards with a 4 port daughterboard to allow for
even more interesting topologies (though this was also just concept
talk).

--
Jason Holmes