[Beowulf] Gigabit switch recommendations

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 at 10:01pm, Bruce Allen wrote

> I suggest that you do some careful netperf testing of the 2724 before you 
> purchase it.  We recently tested some 2716 switches with jumbo frames 
> (MTU=9000) and found the performance to be well below the advertised 'wire 
> speed'.  The response from Dell was 'when we say it's wire speed, we don't 
> really mean it.  This switch is not designed for your application'!
>
> After discussions with some of their technical people, the conclusion was 
> that the switch had enough buffer memory to run wire speed with MTU=1500 but 
> not with MTU=9000.

This is exactly the sort of info I was looking for.  Specs are one thing, 
but real-world benchmarks are far more useful (and harder to find). 
Thanks.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University