[Beowulf] onboard Gb lan: any opinion, sugestion or impression?

[Geoff Jacobs]

Mark Hahn wrote:
>> While looking for the motherboards for our 8-12 dual-core-nodes cluster,
> 
> with a quite small cluster, minor differences in the nic are probably
> going to be imperceptible.  remember that gigabit
> latencies are multiple hundreds of thousands of cpu cycles,
> so if it's practical to use at all, you must be using it extremely
> infrequently...
> 
>> This motherboard uses the nForce 570 MCP chipset from NVidia, and the
>> dual
>> lan bythe Vitesse VSC8601.
> 
> that's the phy, not the nic.  I think this chipset contains the MCP55
> nic, which is pretty well-established, I think.  I don't know if anyone
> has done an in-depth comparison of it vs others for perf or overhead.

Does anyone have bandwidth and CPU utilization tips for PCI and PCIe
busses on enthusiast motherboards? What chipsets perform well? What
chipsets do not?

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs

Go to the Chinese Restaurant,
Order the Special