[Beowulf] GAMMA for Linux 2.6 and Intel PRO/1000

[Giuseppe Ciaccio]

Hello,

although the GAMMA project has indeed come to end long ago, I still
maintain the software in the spare time and now I'm proud to
announce a new release of GAMMA for those who love
(or are committed to)
Gigabit Ethernet for their clusters and are latency-intolerant :-)

Browse http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma/ for details.

This new release of GAMMA will only work with 1000base- NICs based on
the Intel 8254x controllers - Intel PRO/1000 for instance.
All of the other drivers have been abandoned -- lack of spare time ;-(

The system appears to be stable, except when using non-blocking zero-copy
send().  In such case, indeed, the NIC stubbornly hangs after having
transmitted 4 MBytes or so.
Anyone experiencing the same with their PRO/1000...?

GAMMA is traditionally committed to IA32-based CPUs, but a considerable
effort has been done to minimize CPU-dependent things and in fact this
release of GAMMA might be easier to port to other CPUs, should this ever
be of interest...
(no effort to improve code readability though)

I've also read recent postings about ``raw ethernet''...mmmhhh sounds
kind of familiar...

Ciao :-)

Giuseppe Ciaccio               http://www.disi.unige.it/person/CiaccioG/
DISI - Universita' di Genova   via Dodecaneso 35   16146 Genova,   Italy
phone +39 10 353 6637          fax +39 010 3536699 ciaccio at disi.unige.it
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