[Bioclusters] Direct connect infiniband/quadrics?

[Farul Mohd Ghazali]

Has anyone had any experience with a direct connect/point-to-point 
implementation of Quadrics or Inifiniband? I talked to a small lab 
doing some computational chemistry and molecular dynamics work and 
they're interested in setting up a cluster but there is a need to 
justify the cost of a cluster before the budget can be approved.

During the discussion, the idea of using direct connect infiniband or 
quadrics on two dual or quad Opteron nodes came up as a testbed 
platform to justify to management. From a price point of view, this is 
very attractive since it'll probably cost less than $40,000 (two quad 
Opterons, two Quadrics cards) for a testbed system. Money is tight...

So, is this setup workable? In theory this should be faster than a 
gigabit based interconnect, even if it's just two nodes but I'd welcome 
any other ideas/suggestions. Thanks.


-- "Leadership & Life-long Learning" --

Farul Mohd. Ghazali
Manager, Systems & Bioinformatics
Open Source Systems Sdn. Bhd.
www.aldrich.com.my  Tel: +603-8656 0139/29   Fax: +603-8656 0132