Greg Lindahl <lind...@pbm.com> writes: > On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 03:15:28PM -0600, Rahul Nabar wrote: >> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Greg Lindahl <lind...@pbm.com> wrote: >> > On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 01:23:59PM -0600, Rahul Nabar wrote: >> > >> >> In the interest of latency minimum switch hops make sense and for that >> >> loops might sometimes provide the best solution. >> > >> > STP disables all loops. All you gain is a bit of redundancy, but the >> > price is high. >> >> I see! That makes sense. Too bad. I wish there was some non-STP way >> of dealing with loops then. > > Managed switches often include a non-STP way of finding and > suppressing broadcast storms -- I know HP and Cisco have that. > I don't know if it's any better than STP, though. > > In the InfiniBand world loops are encouraged & provide a nice > performance benefit -- the routes are worked out globally by the > Subnet Manager. Also, there is ethernet switch silicon that has an > alternate routing mechanism that's as good as IB -- but I don't > remember if it's standardized or compatible between different silicon > vendors.
For the most trivial of loops there is link aggregation. For more interesting loops you can run many ethernet switches as wire speed ip routers talking a routing protocol like ospf. Eric _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
