[Beowulf]Infrastruture planning for small HPC 40/100 gigabyet eyhernet or Infiniband?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 09:15:23PM -0700, Nifty niftyompi Mitch wrote:

> Did I read this correctly? 
> Are you cutting holes in the walls of a home.....?

Real homes have cable ducts -- I'm limited to drilling through walls.
Unfortunately, due to lousy electric installation I'm stuck with 
severe ground loop issues (I catched that too late orelse
I would have put in a heavy ground wire strung along the CAT 6/7). 
Galvanic separation would be a god-send -- but for the price 
tag, and unavailability of GBit polymer optical.
 
> It seems to me that today's 'exotic' links should be confined
> to the machine room/ data closet.   Consider the current
> maximum length of Infiniband DDR over Cu ....

It's a home installation, not an unobtainium interconnect.
 
> After that you can look at end point bandwidth to an office or
> entertainment room.   It is not hard or expensive to pull high quality
> TV coax which can support multiple HDTV links and multiple cat6 for
> trunked data links leaving the machine room.

CAT 6 is great, except if you see sparks when plugging in RJ-45s.
Also, most systems tend to shutdown spontaneously overnight when
on such dirty network.
 
> Also all wires in the wall MUST be safety rated for such use.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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