Guidance/suggestions for small (6-12 port) gigabit switches and gigabit NICs?

[Michael T. Prinkey]

> (note: read the paper 
> http://www.cs.uni.edu/~gray/gig-over-copper/hsln-lcn.ps)
> 
> I purchased two Netgear 302T nics for about $30 each. They are 32 bit
> cards that will run at 66 Mhz, have a Broadcom chipset, and use
> the tg3 driver. Here as some _preliminary_ results using netpipe(tcp)  
> 
> PCI Speed         Latency       Max Throughput
>  33                 28             700 Mbits/sec (87.5 Mbytes/sec)
>  66                 30             840 Mbits/sec (105 Mbytes/sec)
>                                                                                 
> The tests were done in dual PIII-1.266 Serverworks LE (Supermicro P3TDLE)
> using the kernel 2.40.20, 1500 byte MTU (they support Jumbos, however)
> While not as sexy as a PCI-X 64 bit card, at $30 a card, the performance
> is pretty good.
> 
> Doug
> 

I will second this.  I have been using Netgear 302Ts since late last year.  
I have been using them on dual Xeon boards with on-board Intel Gbit NICs.  
I run the on-board to a switch and use a pair of Netgears to build nearest 
neighbor links.  It makes for a very cost effective way to speed up CFD 
runs that use 1D decompositions.  The latency and bandwith of these cards 
are very impressive considering their low cost and 32-bittedness.

Here is a tar file with full netpipe results for the onboard Intel thru a 
switch and two Netgear 302Ts back to back:

http://aeolusres.homestead.com/files/np_bench.tar.gz

Mike Prinkey
Aeolus Research, Inc.

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