[Beowulf] Cluster Networking

[Carsten Aulbert]

Hi

Dmitry Zaletnev wrote:
> 1. Is there any influence on performance of a NFS-server from the usage of x32 CPU and OS instead of x64, if all other characteristics of the system, i.e. amount of RAM, soft-SATA-II RAID 0, Realtek GLAN NIC are the same?

Not too much I would think. Except maybe the amount of memory a single
process can access or the OS can use as buffer cache. It can be quite a
difference if a file server can hold 3 GB or 32 GB of files in memory if
these files are accessed quite often. But I would tend to think that it
won't matter too much.

> 
> 2. Is the Etherchannel technology (channel bonding) useful for CFD-application running on a cluster of two Dual-Xeon servers?

I don't know, if the traffic between both nodes is limited by the
bandwidth it will help, but if it's just latency it might be bad to use
channel bonding as this usually takes up quite a bit of CPU power and I
have no idea about the impact on latency.

HTH

Carsten