January 31st, 2008
Build a 10 Gbit home network for $1100
Create the ultimate gaming supercomputer?
You’ve overclocked, water cooled, matched DIMMs, added 10k drives and the latest 1 GB video card. But so have all your friends. What now? How about a 10 Gig home network for the ultimate gaming supercomputer?
In a pricing breakthrough you can now buy an 8-port 10 Gig switch, 2 PCI-Express 10 Gig adapters and cables for under $1100. It is the fastest network available for the dollar. Update:
By comparison the cheapest 10 gigE NIC at Newegg is almost $900.
One word, my friend: Infiniband
No, this isn’t 10 Gig Ethernet. An average 10 GigE switch port costs over $2500 today and the overhead of TCP/IP will bog down even hefty systems unless you buy a costly TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine) adapter. No, this is Infiniband, a high-speed, low-latency, low-overhead network widely used in supercomputers, high-end storage and clustered computing.
Originally spec’d in 1999 by Intel, Microsoft and Sun (ngio) and Compaq, IBM and HP (Future I/O) to replace PCI, Infiniband has evolved into a general-purpose high-performance interconnect. As volumes have grown, prices have dropped, but this latest price-cutting iteration took me by surprise.
Drivers are available for Linux, Windows XP and OS X - though serious gamers aren’t likely to be using the latter. The kit is available from Colfax Direct, a new e-store subsidiary of 20 year-old Colfax International.
Some pricing from their web site:
- PCI-Express 10 Gbit adapter: $125
- 8-port unmanaged switch: $750
- Cables: range from $35 to over $900 for plenum-rated 100 M length
The Storage Bits take
Networks and storage can often substitute for each other. With a 10 Gig low-latency network you can configure diskless workstations that really scream. While today’s Infiniband networks are practical only for serious gear heads, early adopters will help point the way to a not-to-distant future when we all have 10 Gig home networks.
Commments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I have no relationship, financial or otherwise, with Colfax. I worked with Colfax’s chip provider, Mellanox, at a previous company and found them a pleasure to deal with.
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/31/08
