[cluster-l] Networking Equipment

[Christopher D. Clausen]

Jim Phillips <jim at ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Nils Oberg wrote:
>
>>
>> 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?
>
> If they have the same backplane bandwidth then they're probably the
> same performance, but I can't guarantee that.  We've used SMC
> switches, and while I noticed that the unmanaged switch we bought as
> a replacement is slower than the older managed switch, it doesn't
> affect the overall application performance.

Note that some switches support jumbo frames and some do not.  You may 
or may not care about a 9000 byte MTU (over the normal 1500) though.

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