From: Bill Maniatty Newsgroups: comp.parallel Subject: Re: newbie questions on networking Date: 20 Dec 1998 06:46:33 GMT Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY, USA Approved: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu Message-Id: <75i6g9$hjh$1@encore.ece.cmu.edu> Originator: bigrigg@ece.cmu.edu Hello Jfsousa: > Well I am tinking of assembling a small cluster that will run under > some flavour of windows or maybe Linux. Its primary function will be > running parrallel code (MPI, PVM), but it must also work as a LAN for > some of the time. I have to design this and I dont really understand > much about networking... > So if anyone could advise me on some books, links or whereever I could > find some information on networking so I could make an informed > decision on what to use, and what will give me the best results, I > would be much obliged. This depends on your applications behavior (computationally) and what sort of underlying hardware/sofwtare support you need. Myrinet is a network having a relatively low latency for a LAN (especially compared with ethernet using TCP/IP). Here at RPI we use mpich for our mpi library support on a variety of platforms. The Beowulf project is geared towards using a collection of PC's running Linux as a sort of parallel architecture. Your success with such a package is likely to be highly architecture dependent. You should also investigate 100 Mbps Ethernet. The FreeBSD is well liked locally by our lab staff, so I guess it deserves a look too. FDDI (fiber optic technology) and ATM might also be of interest. Some links you might be interested in: http://www.myri.com/ http://www.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/ http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/misc/100mbs.html http://beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov/beowulf.html http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~jain/index.html http://www.freebsd.org/ http://www.redhat.com/ Hope that information helps. Regards: Bill Maniatty -- Articles to bigrigg+parallel@cs.cmu.edu (Admin: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu) Archive: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/internet/usenet/comp.parallel