From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Jun 04 1999 - 19:13:26 MDT
Dan Clemmensen writes:
> I'm fairly sure (gut feel, not mathematical analysis) that you
> can make much more cost-effective use of a 4-NIC solution by
> establishing a four-dimensional hypergrid than by bonding.
>
> Of course, it depends on the problem.
Yes. There are problems which scale bad with the numbers of node, and
hence require few nodes with a better networks. One would want to use
a hypernet (all nodes interconnected) or a channel bonded network in
this case.
Then there are embarrassingly parallel problems, which could utilize a
torus, or a diamond lattice network topology (the latter handy for
3d physical problems) which could scale to thousands of node, in some
cases linearly. Of course, one can also combine the multiple-NIC and
multiple-switch approach, to create both channel-bonded few-node
clusters and extremely large 3d lattice clusters using switches as
networking glue. Of course component failure will preclude building
a cluster from significantly more than 1000 nodes. Let's wait for
systems on a chip....
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