[Beowulf] Multirail Clusters: need comments

[Greg Anderson]

I would like to know the views of the cluster gurus on multi-rail clusters,
esp, quad rail networks. Are quad rail networks practical to implement ( say
InfiniBand, Quadrics, Myrinet,  (GE, maybe not?)).

- What are the issues?
- Are there any quad rail HPC clusters? (me and google couldn't find any)
- Are drivers an issue?
- Does the performance increase significantly to justify the cost and
complexity?

The assumption is that the plan is to solve comm or BW crippled apps, on
large SMP nodes (say 8+ CPUs).

Note: I found just one line in a CLRC Daresbury lab presentation about
quadrail Quadrics on Alpha (probably QsNet-1?) Any update on QsNet2/Eagle?

Thanks!
Greg
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