Experience with Force10 GigE switches in larger clusters ...

[Maurice Hilarius]

>From: Richard Walsh <rbw at ahpcrc.org>
>
>All,
>
>Force10 is a newer (1 year) player in the gigabit router/switch
>market.  Looks like they have 4 products (5U, 8U, 15U, 21U) with
>application to large gige clusters supporting up to 336 gige ports
>in a single chassis.  What experience have people had with their
>products in a cluster context? Anyone run the PMB benchmarks on
>a cluster with one of their switches and some reasonably good gige
>cards?  Anyone computed a price per port on their products?  Any
>surprises on the zero-length-message, ping-pong, MPI latency
>numbers?
>
>Thanks for your insights in advance ... :-)
>
>rbw
>
>#---------------------------------------------------
># Richard Walsh


We are setting up a cluster with their E600 in the next couple of weeks.
I would be happy to share results privately.
Please let me know any particular test/benchmark results desired.
Implementation will be with Tyan S2723 ( Intel 7501) and dual XEON 2.4/533, 
2GB RAM per node,
Onboard Intel GigE NIC and SysKonnect SK9821 V2 GigE NICs
Software/management: RH7.3, 2.4.20 kernel, bproc, Rocks Cluster, etc..




With our best regards,

Maurice W. Hilarius       Telephone: 01-780-456-9771
Hard Data Ltd.               FAX:       01-780-456-9772
11060 - 166 Avenue        mailto:maurice at harddata.com
Edmonton, AB, Canada      http://www.harddata.com/
    T5X 1Y3