Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 12:34:35 -0500 (EST) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: "Steven P. Donegan" <donegan@quick.net> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NOW/MOSIX/Beowulf Message-ID: <13962.21666.37548.990651@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.91.981230061126.21721M-100000@oldnews.quick.net> References: <19981229234937.N477@ns1.adsu.bellsouth.com> <Pine.BSI.3.91.981230061126.21721M-100000@oldnews.quick.net>
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Steven P. Donegan writes: > Both have interface support for Myrinet - a proprietary crossbar switch > based gig speed LAN. > The URL for people to read more about Myrinet is http://www.myri.com. I'd like to chime in with the opinion that if you have the money for a high-speed cluster interconnect, Myrinet is an excellent choice. In many respects, Myrinet much more flexible than Gigabit Ethernet. This is primarily because the Myrinet NIC is programmable via downloadble firmware and there are few hardware standards to follow (eg, no hardware imposed MTU, the smallest message can be just 4 bytes, you can design custom header info so messages can be DMA'ed by the NIC to pre-determined memory locations for zero-copy protocols, etc). This flexibility comes at the price of being willing to get your hands dirty & write your own messaging system for Myrinet. Locally, we've done just this -- see http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/trapeze. Trapeze consists of a messaging library and custom firmware for Myrinet. Trapeze currently hosts kernel to kernel RPC communications and zero-copy page migration traffic for network storage, a user-level communications layer for MPI on Digital UNIX, a low-overhead kernel logging and profiling system, and TCP/IP device drivers for FreeBSD and Digital UNIX. I emphasize that Trapeze itself is not a MOSIX or Beowulf equivalent. Rather, Trapeze is a building block that such a parallel NOW cluster could be built on. Our focus is network storage, not parallel processing, so we haven't done so ourselves. Trapeze is essentially the FreeBSD equivalent to the Linux BIP package (http://lhpca.univ-lyon1.fr). Trapeze is available in source form with a BSD style copyright. Trapeze supports FreeBSD (i386 & alpha) as well as Digital UNIX. Note that the release of Trapeze available at the above URL is rather old & we are currently preparing a new release (should be available shortly after the holidays). Drew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew Gallatin, Sr Systems Programmer http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gallatin Duke University Email: gallatin@cs.duke.edu Department of Computer Science Phone: (919) 660-6590 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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