[Beowulf] help on building Beowulf

[Patrick Geoffray]

Hi,

润东 万 wrote:
>   I am thinking of building a Beowulf of 17 dual-core nodes, one head node and 16 computation nodes for material research simulation. I am also a newcomer to the simulation world, but I have some programming experience (no parellel programming), knowledge of Unix operating system and a few shell scripting experience. Equipped with your resorce, I think I can build a new Beowulf.
>   A few questions.
>   1. Is Myrinet expandable? 

Yes it is, as long as you can pay for it. However, you should not
consider any fancy interconnects until you know that Gigabit Ethernet is
not enough for you. GigE is virtually free (NICs on motherboards, good
24-port switch are very inexpensive) and performance is good enough for
most usages. Once you know which metrics are important for your
applications, then you can go shopping for more expensive interconnects,
if you need it.

Patrick