[Beowulf] ethernet bonding performance comparison "802.3ad" vs Adaptive Load Balancing

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 09:25:36PM -0700, Martin Siegert wrote:

> It is my impression that the standard was not written with HPC in
> mind: it addresses the scenario of running many streams over a few
> links, i.e., load balancing (and HA). 

Except that in HPC, you're often talking to several neighbors. And
even more neighbors if you have multiple cores per node.

For example, if you have a 2D grid of nodes, and you have to exchange
halos to the N S E W, then a node will talk to at least 4 neighbors
(if you cleverly lay things out and combine messages), but more likely
12 neighbors, or maybe even 32. That's a lot more than 2 links.

-- greg