[cluster-l] Networking Equipment

[Nils Oberg]

I'm purchasing a 10-node cluster and the interconnect is going to be 
gigabit Ethernet.  The plan is to purchase a 24-port unmanaged 
switch.  I have a few questions regarding equipment quality:

1. Does the vendor matter, or are all 24-port unmanaged switches created equal?

2. Are there better networking cables than others?

3. All of the nodes I'm purchasing have two gigabit Ethernet 
ports.  Is there a way to bundle these ports together to get twice 
the bandwidth/half of the latency of a single port?

If anyone knows of documentation or other resources resources for 
doing this under one of the Linux cluster distributions, please let me know.

Thanks for any help,

Nils



--
Nils Oberg, Research Programmer
Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at U-C
phone: 217-333-8365, web: http://vtchl.uiuc.edu