Re: PATCH - InfiniBand Access Layer (IBAL)

[Matti Aarnio]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 05:29:16PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 07:50:18PM +0000, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > I don't understand why anyone is wasting time on this.  Without available
> > > hardware drivers this huge midlayer is completely useless.
> > You mean this whole huge chunk of code doesn't have any hardware
> > drivers?  What good is it then?
> 
> Beats me. I hope we can just bury this infiniband stuff
> before we waste any more time on it.
> 
> I really can't see any reason why we would want to have
> this.

Maybe you don't, but some do.  Uses are rare, of course, but:
  http://www.apple.com/education/science/profiles/vatech/

People building "cheap supercomputers" will be going that way
most definitely.  Slowest version is 2.5 Gbit/s, and most
common one appears to be running 4x that.


Another thing (for which I would have use at hand right away, actually)
is to have fully functional Fibre Channel subsystem in Linux along
with drivers to modern cards e.g. JNI's.  (2 Gbit/s FC)

Plugging tens of terabytes of disks on a box is somewhat challenging
without resorting to that technology...

I just don't have luxury of having a year or two to spend on
development of necessary things, I need to choose systems with
the support readily in place so I can load in my applications,
and start using them.  :-/


/Matti Aarnio
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