[ewg] HCA load balancing and data striping

[Steffen Persvold]

Hi,

As anyone on this list ever considered or implemented a "meta" ibverbs
device that could do HCA load balancing and/or data striping ? Or even
include it into the native drivers ?

Today, most of the MPIs that work with OFED 1.2 (including ours, Scali
MPI Connect) implement HCA load balancing and data striping in the MPI
transport layer. Wouldn't it be better if this was implemented on a more
generic layer so that other applications could benefit from the same
technology as well ?

These days when the number of cores per SMP machines are increasing
dramatically with quad core processors available, it is quite common for
a lot of the system integrators to include more than 1 HCA in the system
to balance out the IO, no ? 

Comments and thoughts appreciated :)

Cheers,

Steffen Persvold