InfiniBand for the Masses

The Linux cluster world is moving towards InfiniBand for many reasons: bandwidth, latency, message rate, N/2, price/performance, and other factors that affect performance and price. But usually it’s focused on larger systems, many times greater 64 nodes up to multiple thousand nodes. At that same time the reasons for moving to InfiniBand are still valid for smaller clusters, particularly performance, but the economics are not. Basically InfiniBand is just too expensive for smaller systems and usually does not make sense from a price/performance perspective. But that has just changed…