From: Joachim Worringen Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi,comp.parallel.pvm Subject: Re: exp. in channel bonding (bundling) ? Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 09:35:38 +0200 Organization: Chair for Operating Systems, RWTH Aachen Message-Id: <3741184A.64355959@lfbs.rwth-aachen.de> References: <3740261C.E49A031C@markus-fischer.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Xref: ukc comp.parallel.mpi:5099 comp.parallel.pvm:8391 Markus Fischer wrote: > > Hi, > > has anybody made some experiments and/or got experience > (performance graphs, problems ... ) with > channel bonding (two ethernet cards instead of one) to increase > BW ? > Do I have to patch Linux in order to use it (I found the ifenslave.c > on beowulf) ? Or is this working with the beowulf package only ? We adopted MPICH to use any number of connections/channels between groups of processes (see http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/~martin/MetaMPICH/metaframe.html ). Generally, it works as expected: multiplied bandwidth for big messages, higher overhead for smaller messages (we choose the number of channels to use according to the message size). I don't know how to realize that with Beowulf. However, the OS shouldn't have to be modified as long as it can handle multiple Ethernet boards (any Unix can do this?!). Joachim -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | _ : Joachim Worringen, Lehrstuhl fuer Betriebssysteme |_|_`__ : RWTH Aachen, Kopernikusstr. 16, D-52056 Aachen | |__) : Tel. : +49-241/80-7609 | Fax : +49-241/8888-339 |__)S : e-Mail : joachim@lfbs.rwth-aachen.de