AW: AW: mulitcast copy or snowball copy

[Donald Becker]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Rene Storm wrote:

> A geometrically cascading structure gives me some more disadvantages.
> If you are using an additional high performance network, eg myrinet or
> infiniband you won't have problems with the switch bandwidth. 
>
> If you are using low cost Ethernet/Gigabit network topology with 2 or
> more hups between the nodes (like FFN), the last "generation" of the
> snowball could be a heavy bottleneck. 

No one uses Ethernet repeaters on a cluster.  32 port Fast Ethernet
switches are under $5/port.  Even for Gigabit Ethernet, 8 port switches
can be found for $20/port.

An unusual topology might be better utilized by mapping the copy
topology to the physical, but that's not the usual case.  The typical
case is an essentially flat topology, or one close enough that treating
it as flat avoids complexity.


-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
914 Bay Ridge Road, Suite 220		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993

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