[Beowulf] Live Implementation for Clusters

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 20:07 -0700, Ellis Wilson wrote:

> This sparked my LiveCD endeavor.  Now, granted, using
> gigabit ethernet 
> is a huge drawback 

Hey, don't say that. We build and install clusters for customers every
day with gigabit ethernet as the main interconnect.
(And Infiniband; Infinipath; Myrinet;  Quadrics or anything else your
budget will stretch to). 
An enhancement you might like to think of is wiring any second on-board
gigabit ports to a dedicated switch for MPI traffic.
(See Beowulf passim for discussions on the merits of various switches)


People are using our gig ethernet connected clusters right now for
serious computational chemistry work all over the UK.





John Hearns
Senior HPC Engineer
Streamline Computing