[Beowulf] anyone using 10gbaseT?

[Patrick Geoffray]

Hi Mark,

Mark Hahn wrote:
> Hi Beowulfers,
> have you had any experience using 10gbaseT yet?

No switch available with 10G-BaseT ports yet (there are not many 10GigE 
switches to begin with). There may be new products by the end of 2007 
with such ports, but I am not optimistic about general availability. 
Today, it's CX-4 water hoses for clusters and LR fibers for general 
networking.

> I happened on a media story about how quite a few vendors have recently 
> intro'd support for it.  the only nics mentioned were the heavyweight 
> encumbered-with-TOE kind - on them at least,
> the article mentioned 20-25W dissipation.  (which doesn't seem
> like a big deal - about a disk and a half, fraction of a cpu,
> or a tenth of a GPU :)

20-25W is a lot. It's too much to land on a motherboard (that's one of 
the argument against TOE) and it's way too much for dense switches. It's 
going to get better eventually, but it's going to take time. I would 
expect cheaper (quad) fiber solutions sooner than pervasive 10G-BaseT.

Patrick
-- 
Patrick Geoffray
Myricom, Inc.
http://www.myri.com