I can’t afford infiniband - what’s the next best thing I can to on my mini-cluster? Mobos come with GigE built in now, and I can’t afford 10 gigabit cards. Does anyone know of a switch brand to avoid? I will let my router assign IP’s but the switch will intercept and route MPICH2 traffic between nodes after that, at least, that’s my best understanding. Each node will be an overclocked Magny-Cours x6.
Thanks for any advice!!!
Patricia:)
PS: Does anyone know of OpenMPI is better (faster) than MPICH2?
Recommend Gig#. There should be inexpensive switches not too muh more expensive than Fast Ethernet.
Also, for what you’re doing you could probably benefit greatly by optimizing for large, fast file transfers.
Besides configuring Jumbo Frames, recommend you take a look at my paper
In fact, anyone whose network connections aren’t wired over high quality network and Internet connections should benefit greatly from this paper, that includes, WiFi, CDMA, Bluetooth, Satellite, Medium or High Capacity servers serving multiple clients simultaneously, extremely large file transfers, more.
Thank you - I will check it out. I’m trying to refresh my memory from years ago setting up mpich - now everyone is talking cloud and such things - so it is hard to google (and find) good, barebones, simple discussions on making two computers recognize each other. I just found a pretty good site and the MPICH2 home site - I hope I get my hosts file set up right and get Hydra running. It seems not too difficult to do if you set up NFS so you don’t have to install software on all the different computers. I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible.
I would think by now there would be default settings in place to have several boxes talk to each other. But maybe not too many non-professional folks do this. I’m trying to get some numerical weather prediction software to use both of the Phenom II 1090T’s that I have.