space requirements

[Mark Hahn]

> Just to let you know Extreme Networks has their BlackDiamond 6818 that will
> support upto 1440 100BT ports with 640Bbps non-blocking backplane all in 35U

it's pretty impressive; I imagine the pricetag is too.
I think the 640 Gbps is a bit wrong though (actually 256):
http://www.extremenetworks.com/products/blackdiamond/chart.asp

I'd question whether such a cluster would make much sense, though.
do you know of a class of probles that would lead to O(1440-way)
parallel jobs that needed only 100bT and yet had no hotspots?
31 47U racks full of 1U nodes, ugh!

there *are* sites which have real cluster networks (quadrics,
perhaps myrinet) of that size.  iirc they're not quite full BB
(fat trees and whatnot).  I'd still prefer a 740-node Quadrics
net over 1440 100bT ;)