[Beowulf] 3C2000 NIC discontinued

[Douglas Eadline]

For new projects, you may want to consider IB as
the costs have come down. See this:

http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/222/2/

I have some performance numbers for these cards
(back to back) and they work quite well for the
price ($125). I'll be posing some data soon
(4 us latency and 5000 Mbits/sec using OpenMPI
and netpipe)

Of course, for the real cheapskates (like me)
there is always the PT 1000 "desktop" (~$50)
adapter (1X PCIe). Using TCP netpipe
I see 27-30 us latency and 850 Mbits/sec
But as the core counts on the motherboards
get higher, IB gets more attractive.
I'm playing with open-mx on these adapters
and I get about 12us netpipe MPI latency.

--
Doug


> Hello, Beowulf list.
>
> I've been using 3COM 3C2000 Gigabit NIC's in our Beowulf cluster since I
> built it. I'm very happy with them, but 3COM have now discontinued the
> product:
>
> http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=features&sku=3C996B-T&pathtype=purchase
>
> I'd be grateful for comments or advice about alternative 'server' grade
> NIC's that, like the 3C2000, can offload some of the burden the host CPU
> would otherwise have to deal with. At present, I use the 3C2000 in all
> the servers and PXE-booted compute nodes in our Beowulf, and I have a
> few spares, but I want to find an alternative NIC for two new projects.
>
> Thanks,
>
> 	Tony.
> --
> Dr. A.J.Travis,                     |  mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk
> Rowett Research Institute,          |    http://www.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt
> Greenburn Road, Bucksburn,          |   phone:+44 (0)1224 712751
> Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK.    |     fax:+44 (0)1224 716687
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--
Doug