You also should ask yourself what are you going to determine using point to point IB/Quadrics? Assuming you have some benchmark code that is well written and works on both IB/Quadrics and Ethernet, your results will show Ethernet is slower. But you might not be able to determine if using IB/Quadrics justifies the cost. Perhaps a better test case is needed. How well will your application scale? You might want to spend the money on a ~16 node cluster with GB Ethernet for the test bed. If your tests run well on GB Ethernet you could then extrapolate the benefits of upgrading to IB/Quadrics. -- John Van Workum Tsunamic Technologies Inc. www.tsunamictechnologies.com -- > > Has anyone had any experience with a direct connect/point-to-point > implementation of Quadrics or Inifiniband? I talked to a small lab > doing some computational chemistry and molecular dynamics work and > they're interested in setting up a cluster but there is a need to > justify the cost of a cluster before the budget can be approved. > > During the discussion, the idea of using direct connect infiniband or > quadrics on two dual or quad Opteron nodes came up as a testbed > platform to justify to management. From a price point of view, this is > very attractive since it'll probably cost less than $40,000 (two quad > Opterons, two Quadrics cards) for a testbed system. Money is tight... > > So, is this setup workable? In theory this should be faster than a > gigabit based interconnect, even if it's just two nodes but I'd welcome > any other ideas/suggestions. Thanks. > > > -- "Leadership & Life-long Learning" -- > > Farul Mohd. Ghazali > Manager, Systems & Bioinformatics > Open Source Systems Sdn. Bhd. > www.aldrich.com.my Tel: +603-8656 0139/29 Fax: +603-8656 0132 > > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters >