[Beowulf] Re: Beowulf Digest, Vol 57, Issue 9

[John Hearns]

2008/11/11 Alcides Simao <alsimao at gmail.com>

> Hello all!
>
> I've heard that there are some motherboards, if I can recall I believe it's
> Intel, that make use of a Yukon driver, that happens not to work well under
> Linux, and hence, it is a serious problem for Beowulfing.
>
>
I think this has been covered on the Beowulf list before.
Think seriously about  getting hold of  a set of separate Intel Pro-1000
network cards if you are going to run MPI over Ethernet.
The Intel drivers are well developed, and the cards perform well. By all
means run your cluster management and NFS storage over the on-board
chipsets, but you may find it wort the extra expense to have separate NICs
for the MPI.

I agree with the point abotu the Marvell driver - I recall a session I ahd
with a system at University of Newcastle. The external connection was to
their campus LAN  - which was a 100Mbps connection to a Cisco switch. In our
lab, the external connection ran just run on a gig E connection to Nortel.
We piled gbytes of data up and down it. But connect to a slow LAN - and it
stops after 20 minutes. the cause being explicit congestion notification
packets. I COULD have spent time updating the driver etc. etc.
But I took the road of fitting a PCI-e Intel card and configuring that up
with the external IP Address. Worked fine.
I hate to say it, but it depends on how much you value your time.
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