25 Feb 2013 robertc   » (Master)

El cheapo 10Gbps networking

I’ve been hitting the limits of gigabit ethernet at home for quite a while now, and as I spend more time working with cloud technologies this started to frustrate me.

I’d heard of other folk getting good results with second hand Infiniband cards and decided to give it a go myself.

I bought two Voltaire dual-port Infiniband adapters – a 4X SDR PCI-E x4 card. And in a 2 metre 8470 cable, and we’re in business.

There are other, more comprehensive guides around to setting this up – e.g. http://davidhunt.ie/wp/?p=2291 or http://pkg-ofed.alioth.debian.org/howto/infiniband-howto-4.html

On ubuntu the hardware was autodetected; all I needed to do was:

modprobe ib_ipoib
sudo apt-get install opensm # on one machine

And configure /etc/network/interfaces – e.g.:

iface ib1 inet static
address 192.168.2.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.2.0
up echo connected >`find /sys -name mode | grep ib1`
up echo 65520 >`find /sys -name mtu | grep ib1`

With no further tuning I was able to get 2Gbps doing linear file copies via Samba, which I suspect is rather pushing the limits of my circa 2007 home server – I’ll investigate futher to identify where the bottlenecks are, but the networking itself I suspect is ok – netperf got me 6.7Gbps in a trivial test.


Syndicated 2013-02-25 01:40:43 from Code happens

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!