Two new PC's for me!

[BrotherBart]

Have fun with the stuff. Place is gonna look like my basement data center did soon. Had four HP Xeons hulking in the server cabinets and two com racks running with a T1 into the place.

Just completed the retirement downsizing today. Two new laptops and a tiny little router. And the basement is cold and dark.

 

[Ashful]

Hehehe
Pinky: so what are you gonna do tonight, brain.
The Brain: The same thing I do every night....try and take over the worrrld.

Coming from the guy who's middle name might be, "more horsepower."

"Moderate" my arse.

 

[Ashful]

Okay... question, guys. I have my own 8G managed switch between my three PC's now, with a single 1G uplink to the rest of our network. The more thruput I can get between these two machines of mine, the faster my work can run, as I'm splitting calculations between these two machines, and reassembling the data on the tale end. I see each of these T7600 has two Ethernet ports, and ipconfig reveals two 1G NICs in each machine with two separate MAC addresses. I know that 2G trunks between switches rely on using two 1G cat5e links... so is that what I have here? I can find no good literature explaining why the T7600's have two NIC's, and if they have 2G capability. I'm not really strong on keeping up with the latest networking stuff, as I was many years ago.

 

[Swedishchef]

Okay... question, guys. I have my own 8G managed switch between my three PC's now, with a single 1G uplink to the rest of our network. The more thruput I can get between these two machines of mine, the faster my work can run, as I'm splitting calculations between these two machines, and reassembling the data on the tale end. I see each of these T7600 has two Ethernet ports, and ipconfig reveals two 1G NICs in each machine with two separate MAC addresses. I know that 2G trunks between switches rely on using two 1G cat5e links... so is that what I have here? I can find no good literature explaining why the T7600's have two NIC's, and if they have 2G capability. I'm not really strong on keeping up with the latest networking stuff, as I was many years ago.

From the bit of IT experience I have, my feeling is that you have two 1G cat5 links.

Those are sweet number crunchers. I build my own PCs for fun but nothing that powerful.

One of the most interesting things I have ever seen was 13 years ago: SGI (silicon graphics inc) had a 53 foot semi trailer travel unit. It was a beast od a demo trailer.....they had a 128 processor super computer for number crunching and graphics rendering. At the time, supposedly, Pixar were using their machines (they used to sell desktop models, my supervisor in University bought a couple for molecular 3d rendering ). No bus on their computers, straight connections between hardware therefore no bottlenecking on a bus for transfer speeds. Quite impressive.

 

[jharkin]

Oh I remember those SGIs well. We had desktops at work for CAD workstations, for a few years in the late 90s my primary machine at work was an SGI Octane. Interesting machines, but their own flavor of unix (IRIX) was a little quirky and we ended up having to remember slightly different commands if you where on and SGI, or a Sun Sparc, or and IBM or a DEC.

In fact I below the motherboard on that SGI once and it took IT a couple months to get a replacement. Those things used to cost the company more than my car was worth.


Anyway back to Jofuls question, as far as I know you are right Sweedish, if both NICs are enabled in windows it should be able to run them in duplex for a 2Gbps connection. Its been a long time since I messed with this stuff either.. once right out of college a bunch of us had this idea to build a distributed supercomputer bewoulf cluster using cheap PCs in our apartment and sell time on it. We had looked at piggybacking network cards for more bandwidth between the machines, but back then a 100mbps card was spendy (thinking 98 or '99 here, some of hese machines where still on coax ethernet). Idea never got off the ground.... too bad maybe we would have been a "cloud" pioneer if we had pursued it.

 

[bag of hammers]

Okay... question, guys. I have my own 8G managed switch between my three PC's now, with a single 1G uplink to the rest of our network. The more thruput I can get between these two machines of mine, the faster my work can run, as I'm splitting calculations between these two machines, and reassembling the data on the tale end. I see each of these T7600 has two Ethernet ports, and ipconfig reveals two 1G NICs in each machine with two separate MAC addresses. I know that 2G trunks between switches rely on using two 1G cat5e links... so is that what I have here? I can find no good literature explaining why the T7600's have two NIC's, and if they have 2G capability. I'm not really strong on keeping up with the latest networking stuff, as I was many years ago.

Sounds like you may have an opportunity to team those NICs for link aggregation off your switch (get your 2G) or use them for redundancy (failover). You have some smoking' hardware, please don't start cracking p-words ....

 

[Ashful]

Sounds like you may have an opportunity to team those NICs for link aggregation off your switch (get your 2G) or use them for redundancy (failover). You have some smoking' hardware, please don't start cracking p-words ....

hah... never thought of that.

These things are just for hardcore solving of complete 3D field distributions. Some of these simulations, which would take 110 - 120 hours on my old PC with two quad-core Nehalem Xeon's at 2.6 GHz will solve in 14 hours on these new CPU's, or 1.5 hours on the new GPU's! It's really a quantum-leap in performance. Good thing, too... I was just asked to quote time and cost on the largest structure I've ever tackled in my life.

... or as one of our IT guys put it to me yesterday, "man, this rig can surf porn really fast!"

 

[Swedishchef]

"man, this rig can surf porn really fast!"

LOLOL
aHHHHH...the basic computer functions. Who cares about pioneer research: just make sure it loads videos and pictures quickly.

 

[Treacherous]

I thought you were doing some Bitcoin mining when I first saw those machines

You need to get some 10GB ethernet or 16GB Fibre Channel in the mix

I think some of the 40GB ethernet stuff is just now coming on the market.

 

[Treacherous]

[quote="jharkin, post: 1642473, member: 11939"

Anyway back to Jofuls question, as far as I know you are right Sweedish, if both NICs are enabled in windows it should be able to run them in duplex for a 2Gbps connection. Its been a long time since I messed with this stuff either.. once right out of college a bunch of us had this idea to build a distribute.[/quote]

NIC needs to support teaming.

 

[Treacherous]

Other than some monster SGI server I can't remember the model name of in mid '90s...this is the only SGI workstation I ever played with. I was far stronger in Solaris than Irix. I think Solaris was easier though.

 

[Ashful]

I think some of the 40GB ethernet stuff is just now coming on the market.

I was actually designing 40 Gb/s transmitters and receivers back in 2004! That was for back bone / long haul stuff, though... figured it might be making into the SAN market by now, but had no idea anyone was setting up business servers or workstations on those links! Fast stuff.

Actually, the network traffic I'll generate is probably not that extreme. A 2G link will surely do me well. My real bottleneck is processing, hence the 32 Xeon cores and two K20's!

 

[Swedishchef]

Other than some monster SGI server I can't remember the model name of in mid '90s...this is the only SGI workstation I ever played with. I was far stronger in Solaris than Irix. I think Solaris was easier though.

those are the basic desktops they sold. I used to call them r2d2......nice little machines, we had 6 of them.

 

[Swedishchef]

I was actually designing 40 Gb/s transmitters and receivers back in 2004! That was for back bone / long haul stuff, though... figured it might be making into the SAN market by now, but had no idea anyone was setting up business servers or workstations on those links! Fast stuff.

Actually, the network traffic I'll generate is probably not that extreme. A 2G link will surely do me well. My real bottleneck is processing, hence the 32 Xeon cores and two K20's!

I wish I had your new computers for making CDs and DVDs....lol.

 

[Jags]

Joful - you should be able to duplex the two nic outputs. The real trick is gonna be designating the traffic on each one so that on the back end you can re-assemble the data into something that makes sense. A typical config for dual nics is when serving data. Such as...you would connect one to a dedicated internet drop, then use the other to hit network traffic. I am not real sure how it would/will work trying to parallel output data, unless you could actually dedicated a specific "traffic" to each side of the card. It would almost make sense to think of the thing as a router.

 

[firefighterjake]

Hehheh . . . when I read you computer technies going back and forth I feel like my cats when I am talking to them.

Words words words words Jackson words words words words good boy words words words dinner time words words words words.


Words words words words computer words words words words fast words words words expensive words words words words.

 

[Jags]

So far it has been pretty benign. Wait till we start talking about the IPv6 protocol with its 128 bit address space that can support 3.4W1038 unique ip addresses.

 

[jharkin]

Does anything actaully use IPv6 yet? I still turn it off in the windows network stack on new installs.....

 

[Jags]

Not so much (yet). Sometime in the future we will be forced to. Gonna run out of IPs using the current architecture. And this really only affects the "public" side of the IP world. Internal networks aren't really affected (not big enough to run out of addys).

 

[firefighterjake]

So far it has been pretty benign. Wait till we start talking about the IPv6 protocol with its 128 bit address space that can support 3.4W1038 unique ip addresses.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

 

[Jags]

Thanks for the giggle, Jake. Needed that.

 

[jharkin]

Not so much (yet). Sometime in the future we will be forced to. Gonna run out of IPs using the current architecture. And this really only affects the "public" side of the IP world. Internal networks aren't really affected (not big enough to run out of addys).

Yeah, i know its coming just havent seen much. We only had change requests to start building in support to our server software at work last year, have not heard of customers using it much yet.

I'll miss IPv4. Its easy to just memorize the address of my DNS, netmask and gateway and type it in when setting up new machines on the network. How the heck am I going to remember these 28 digit hex adresses??

 

[BrotherBart]

Words words words words Jackson words words words words good boy words words words dinner time words words words words.

Don't kid me Jake. All paid and volunteer firefighters are computer experts. At least they were when I was implementing a dispatch and records management system. They all knew better ways for me to do it.

 

[firefighterjake]

Don't kid me Jake. All paid and volunteer firefighters are computer experts. At least they were when I was implementing a dispatch and records management system. They all knew better ways for me to do it.

Not this guy . . . but I have a friend who is a firefighter who I think is just as capable if not more so of doing the IT's guys' job.

 

[Ashful]

Well, after more digging, there's a driver from Intel, which puts these NIC chip's into the right configuration for 2G. Then my router has to be reconfigured for 2G trunk on the ports for these two machines. Not the most straightforward thing, but doable.

Since the software I'm using is node-locked by MAC address, now I just have to figure out how the licensing will be handled with four NIC's between two machines.