[Beowulf] Open InfiniBand

[Peter Kjellström]

On Wednesday 21 December 2005 09:55, Daniel Pfenniger wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have a cluster with InfiniBand network that works flawlessly.  The
> problem is that the binary IB drivers are proprietary, and the company has
> been recently absorbed by a larger one, which means that the driver support
> for Mellanox cards is now frozen.

Just to be clear, this is not true for IB in general but for this company in 
perticular. For example, Mellanox itself sells IB equipment and provides 
software that recompiles nicely with most kernels (IBGD).

> The proprietary drivers prevents to upgrade or tweak the kernel, or to use
> a recent version of mpich2 (with MPI 2 and one-sided communications).
>
> Fortunately OpenIB (openib.org) has published open source drivers which are
> included in the latest kernels >= 2.6.14.
> Before exploring this option I just want to ask the list if anyone has used
> the OpenIB drivers for production work, in particular with an open source
> MPI?

I have tried a few combinations of openib.org software and for what we do it 
seems to be functionally equivalent to the old software stack. However, since 
openib hasn't even reached 1.0 yet we are still only using it for testing...

/Peter

>
> Thanks, Dan

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
  Peter Kjellström               |
  National Supercomputer Centre  |
  Sweden                         | http://www.nsc.liu.se
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