about fast interconnects and SCI in particular

[Knut Omang]

Florent Calvayrac <fcalvay@aviion.univ-lemans.fr> wrote:
...
>
> I include a summary of the most informative answers at the end of this
> posting.
> 
> 
> Pondering a lot about the question, I now wonder if Myrinet, and Dolphin/Scali,
> are not in the opposite direction of the Beowulf/Extreme Linux approach. For
> Scali in particular :
> 
> -Linux is only supported thanks to the Paderborn PhD students, 
            ^^^^
It is correct that an excellent job of porting the driver from Solaris was done by Roger
Butenuth at University of Paderborn, as was the Solaris version and the
common Unix parts written by me while I was a PhD.student at University of
Oslo and the initial version of the driver (for NT) was written by another
ph.D.student, Stein Jørgen Ryan, at University of Oslo at that time. The
initial design document is available at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~sci/Publications.

Since these initial ports, considerable time and effort has been
invested by Scali in bringing the initial versions to production quality.
As an example, note that 86% of the code used in the current Linux version of the
driver is shared between Linux and other ports although kernel interfaces
have a lot of differences. Almost a 100% of the user level library that I
wrote as a Ph.D student is shared between the different Unix versions.

> and most of the source code is subject to nondisclosure, and definitely not GPL

but still we offer to provide source to users that need to be able to do
modifications. Also we are of course open for improvement requests.
I know from my University experience that open source is important in case
of problems, but also that even most University users would rather get
a binary that works good and have the right functionality for their
requirements than something not so well functioning and having to cope with
the source themselves.

> -premium prices are charged for a technology which is admittedly a standard
> but only supported by one hardware maker ; I do not like the idea
> of being dependent of only one society which can then charge arbitrary prices
> for upgrades, or go down as so many in this business.

As far as I know, we do not charge anything for the driver itself.

Knut Omang, Ph.D.
Senior Software Architect, Scali AS Computer Systems /
Assistant Professor, Dep. of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
e-mail: knuto@scali.no / knuto@ifi.uio.no
Voice: +47 63 84 67 09 / +47 22 50 14 11 / +47 22 85 24 34
http://www.scali.com    Fax:   +47 63 84 40 05
http://www.ifi.uio.no:/~knuto/