[Beowulf] cluster on Mellanox Infiniband

[Mikhail Kuzminsky]

  We are purchasing a pair of Mellanox Infiniband 4x HCA cards
(PCI-X/133) for building of small 2-nodes 4-processor switchless
testing cluster on the base of AMD Opteron w/Tyan S2880 boards.
The nodes work under SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64.

I'll be very appreciate in receiving any information about following:

1) Do we need to buy some additional software from Mellanox ?
(like THCA-3 or HPC Gold CD Distrib etc)

2) Any information about potential problems of building and using
of this hard/software. 

To be more exactly, we want to install also MVAPICH (for MPI-1) or
new VMI 2.0 from NCSA for work w/MPI. 

For example, VMI 2.0, I beleive, requires THCA-3 and HPC Gold CD for
installation. But I don't know, will we receive this software w/Mellanox
cards or we should buy this software additionally ?

I need this data badly, because we are very restricted in money ;-) !

Thanks for your help !

Yours
Mikhail Kuzminsky
Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
Moscow