[cluster-l] Networking Equipment

[Jim Phillips]

I think jumbo frames were more of a benefit when gigabit was new, cards 
were dumb, and processors were slow.  I can measure 900 Mbit/s with 
netperf on our cluster so I don't think jumbo frames would help much.

Also, since all machines on a switch need to have jumbo frames you can't 
use it to netboot or plug the switch into the building network (not that 
you'd want to do that).

-Jim


On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Christopher D. Clausen wrote:

> 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.
>
> <<CDC
>
>
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