This page documents the upgrade effort related to installing and operating a 10GigE network link on Cheaha as part of the 10GigErNet project.

Compatibility

Two cards are being considered and their availability depends on the PCI technology of the motherboard and whether it support PCI-X or PCIe. From the reference links, it's clear PCIe is the technology to go with in aggressive single-node performance situations.

This performance comparison indicates the limit of PCI-X is 1Gbs, so clearly maximizing the bandwidth to/from a cluster with technology would suggest multiple 1GigE links fed into a 10GigE uplink, eg. via switch.

Performance

The maximum theoretical data transfer performance for Cheaha needs to be computed based on the technologies contained in the system.

References