Hi! I am building home cluster where I going to have about 16 nodes which can live with 1G ports, but I really want to have 10GE on file server & central node. It's all local, so no need for cabels longer than 3-5m. And ofcourse I want to spend as little money as possible (not going to spend more than whole cluster costs) :-)

What are my options?

1) Legacy solution is to take some 24-48 port 1GE switch, and connect to file/central nodes via 4-8 aggregated links. This will work I guess, cost is very acceptable, but I am not sure if it's ok to use that much aggregated links. And ofcourse it would be hard to double bandwidth when needed... :-D

2) Switch with several 10GE uplink 'ports'. As far as I see, they all require modules which costs about 1000$, so I will need 4 10G modules, and 2 10GE cards... Smells like way more than 5000$+...

3) Connect file & central node via 2 10G cards directly, and put 4 quadport 1GE NICs on fileserver. I am saving on 2 10G modules and a switch, fileserver will have to do packet routing, but it's still gonna have alot of CPU's left :-)

4) Any other options? Infiniband?

5) Are MyriNet adaptors works fine? I guess there are no cheaper options?

6) Hmm... Scrap fileserver, put it all on central node and provide dedicated 1GE port for each of the nodes... This is sad...