Simon Bullen's Weblog : Weblog

Thursday Mar 08, 2007

Back to Back IB

It seems that for various reasons that a lot of people want to be able to run 2 machines back to back with an IB interconnect.
While this should be a fairly simple operation to perform, life in the IB world makes it quites hard to achieve.

Why ?

Well it's down to to the subnet manager, this on small deployments resides on the switch, for larger deployments this moves to a host and as with most things in life the bigger they are the more they cost. So with a back-to-back rig do you really want to spend a lot of money on a host based SM ? well of coarse not. So what are your options, well you only have one and that is using openIB.

But lets drop a little issue into the pot, you want to run Solaris not Linux, what are your options then ?

Not a lot is the answer, but what if Sun made the Solaris SM open source ?

We have had Grid engine open source for ages now and it is one of the best bits of software out there for scheduling so I say lets make Solaris SM open source and let people run small back to back solutions on the best , most reliable and stable operating systems in the world.

If you have an opinion on this please let me know.

tags [infiniband][network]

Posted at 04:54PM Mar 08, 2007 by Simon Bullen in Networking | Comments[2]

Comments:

OpenSM is open source (dual-licensed under BSD and GPL licenses). Why can't it just be ported to Solaris?

Posted by Mark on March 12, 2007 at 06:59 PM GMT #

Hi Simon, We have a big Sun client ( a bank in the UK) who are very keen to have a Sun infinband subnet manager so that they can connect two servers back to back without a switch. (They need to have them 10 metres apart and want to use single 10m IB cables) Can I please have a copy of this IB subnet manager which works on Solaris 10 ? How can we get this ? Thank you, Geoffrey

Posted by Geoffrey Strage on March 23, 2007 at 09:58 AM GMT #