Gb ethernet switches

[William R. Pearson]

I am about to purchase a "Beowulf" cluster (12 nodes plus a head)
connected by a dedicated switch, and recently saw that some people are
configuring these machines with a Gb switch, so that the head has 1 Gb
bandwidth to the switch, which then talks to the nodes at 100 Mhz.

This seems relatively cost effective, since Gb switches with only 1 or
2 ports are not so much more expensive than conventional 24-port 100
Mb switches.  For my applications, which are embarrassingly parallel,
much of the communication would be from head to (several) nodes.

I am curious whether you can offer any suggestions on a switch to
choose.

Bill Pearson