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We implemented a small office solution using Infiniband purely on a cost per performance mark. We have a small cluster of 10 servers and for less that 120K, all from HP. <BR>
<BR>
Pure and simple, Infiniband offers the best price per performance when considering SAN and MPI consolidation vs F.C. + GbE. <BR>
<BR>
Not limited to top 500 HPC anymore, just those with common sense.<BR>
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On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 00:23 -0700, David Miller wrote:
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">From: "Sean Hefty" <<A HREF="mailto:sean.hefty@intel.com">sean.hefty@intel.com</A>></FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:01:07 -0700</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Millions of Infiniband ports are in operation today. Over 25% of the top 500</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> supercomputers use Infiniband. The formation of the OpenFabrics Alliance was</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> pushed and has been continuously funded by an RDMA customer - the US National</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Labs. RDMA technologies are backed by Cisco, IBM, Intel, QLogic, Sun, Voltaire,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Mellanox, NetApp, AMD, Dell, HP, Oracle, Unisys, Emulex, Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> LSI, SGI, Sandia, and at least two dozen other companies. IDC expects</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Infiniband adapter revenue to triple between 2006 and 2011, and switch revenue</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> to increase six-fold (combined revenues of 1 billion).</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">Scale these numbers with reality and usage.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">These vendors pour in huge amounts of money into a relatively small</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">number of extremely large cluster installations. Besides the folks</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">doing nuke and whole-earth simulations at some government lab, nobody</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">cares. And part of the investment is not being done wholly for smart</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">economic reasons, but also largely publicity purposes.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">So present your great Infiniband numbers with that being admitted up</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">front, ok?</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">It's relevance to Linux as a general purpose operating system that</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">should be "good enough" for %99 of the world is close to NIL.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">People have been pouring tons of money and research into doing stupid</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">things to make clusters go fast, and in such a way that make zero</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">sense for general purpose operating systems, for ages. RDMA is just</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">one such example.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">BTW, I find it ironic that you mention memory bandwidth as a retort,</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">as Roland's favorite stateless offload devil, TSO, deals explicity</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">with lowering the per-packet BUS bandwidth usage of TCP. LRO</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">offloading does likewise.</FONT>
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