[Beowulf] Max flops to watts hardware for a cluster

[William Dieter]

On Wednesday, February 18, 2004, at 09:35 AM, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, William Dieter wrote:
>
>> 23 	Generic Fast Ethernet NIC 	  $8.00 	$184.00
>
> How much in terms of power have you assigned to this item ?

The tool is not perfect.  We have not broken down the power to that 
level of detail.  There is a tradeoff between how much work you have to 
do for each component and how much detail the model has.

> If you really buy a cheap low-end FE NIC, you'll most probably end up
> with a RTL8139 based card. This chip by design puts quite a load on
> the main CPU especially if you use it in a cluster context (=lots of
> network activity). This might increase significantly the power
> consumption or reduce the available flops...

To get really accurate power consumption numbers we would have to 
measure for many different CPU/Motherboard/NIC combinations.

OTOH, there are some really cheap cards based on the Davicom 9102 
chipset, (newegg.com has at least two different brands for $4.00 to 
$6.00).  The Davicom 9102  is enough of a tulip clone that the Ethernet 
HOWTO recommends trying the tulip driver before the manufacturer 
supplied driver...

Bill.

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