Network
Cluster Networking is the backbone of a high performance cluster solution. If your cluster design requires a high-speed interconnect, either InfiniBand, Myrinet or Ethernet can provide network solutions characterized by higher bandwidth and low-latency. These technologies provide you with low latencies, and blazing fast performance. Currently 40Gb/s full-duplex technologies are available, with even faster on the way.
The most basic HPC cluster will utilize a single Gigabit Ethernet network for administrative traffic, data sharing and applications processing traffic. If your applications are bandwidth or latency sensitive, using only a high speed interconnect like Infiniband for your cluster network is preferred.
Often, an HPC cluster will be configured with two networks. The first, a Gigabit Ethernet Interface on each node and is identical to the single Ethernet network used by the basic HPC cluster. This is used for scheduling, node maintenance, basic logins, and perhaps data sharing, while the 2nd internal network is dedicated to computational traffic. This configuration ensures that critical computational traffic is not hampered by other traffic.
Choosing the right Interconnect depends on balancing cost with bandwidth and latency. For More Information about a specific Interconnect, click on the appropriate link below:
