On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 12:44, Chris Dwan (CCGB) wrote: > > The question is one of latency. If your data motion tends to come in > large bursts (get the blast target, write the output) then a little delay > at the beginning of each transmission won't hurt too much. Gigabit is > fine. Heck, some poor university folks get by mostly with 100 base-T. :) > > If, on the other hand, your process needs to communicate small amounts of > data, frequently (this particle moved out of my cell in the simulation, > someone else better pick it up and send me an "ack") those litle hits for > setting up a transmission will really add up. > > For the sequence based work with which I usually help out, I would almost > always rather have the additional nodes. That opinion will change as soon > as I have to deal with any truly parallel, message passing jobs. > Question is it really necessary. Sure it will give you higher position in top 500 list, but the price/performance ration IMHO is not worth going in that direction. As someone already pointed out SGI Altrix is cheaper than the home-brewed low-latency interconnect. For bioinformatics is sure copper/fiber base networking is more than enough (for sequence analysis it goes without saying). Real-time analysis ofcourse will benefit from such low-latency interconnect. And copper/fiber based networking has come a long way. Malay