On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 02:18:42PM +0000, John Mc Donald wrote:
> Also, what kind of topology would you suggest with the setup you have mentioned?
> If you are linking them through hubs don't you still have collision problems?
>> > Would it not be cheaper to put four ethernet cards in each machine,
> > rather than going for a switch ? it's a good bit faster/cheaper/cool
> > looking.
Putting multiple interfaces in machines would surely limit youre selection of topology, with a switch you can pretty much leave it to the message passing doftware to sort out the topology, then of course you can change the topology without rewiring.
You will allways run the risk of having collision problems on a network with a hub, but would have thought that if you were building a cluster like this it would be to haness processing power. If you have a situation where your program is slowing down due to collisons on a 100Mb hub then I think you better think about redesigning your program to not pass so many messages :)
Al
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