[Beowulf] Multiple NIC on a node

[Geoff Jacobs]

Nathan Moore wrote:
> I don't know.  Its a 24 port cisco that I got from our local network admin.
> 
> Nathan

Timothy Mattox describes the network engineering challenges wrt switches
far better than I could:
http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2001-March/002760.html

You're going to have to make a decision on what strategy to follow, and
part of that decision is going to be informed by the performance
characteristics of your application, as well as the networking hardware
your cluster will be equipped with.

So, if your application does a great deal of file I/O on the nodes, you
might consider implementing a service network through the second network
ports. However, if your application needs more total bandwidth on a
single network, you will want to go with channel bonding. If the
driver(s) for your network ports do not play well with the channel
bonding interface, you will have to go with another option, or buy some
different network cards. Also, depending on the capability of the
switch, you might have to buy a second (dumb) switch to make your plans
work.

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs