[Beowulf] fast interconnects

[Mark Hahn]

> As for bit error rates.. 10^-15 is the going in worst case, and 10^-18 is 
> the typical design point.  A bit of a challenge to test the latter however 
> (10^18 bits at 10^10 bits/sec takes 10^8 seconds)

I did a little research, and could only find reference to 10^-12 
as the target BER for 10gbase-t.  I'm not sure how much this would 
matter though - surely people would still use the usual higher-level 
checksum/retransmission, no?  also, from what I read, the main 
concern wrt BER is length-related insertion loss.  obviously, if 
the system can manage 10^-12 at 100M, it'll have a much easier time 
for inside-machineroom runs (say, 15M) or in-cluster (<10 most of 
the time).