[greglindahl]

That's a narrow definition of "commodity" -- the special networks cost less than the same speed of Ethernet, and Intel server chips (non-phi) aren't that different from desktop CPUs.

If you look through the archives of the beowulf mailing list, occasionally someone makes the argument you're making, and few people agree with it.

[stonogo]

There is no 'same speed of Ethernet' for infiniband or omnipath or aries, etc. There is more to these networks than throughput, and the switches approach a million dollars apiece.

The rest of the non-phi/non-tesla hardware is pretty much off the shelf, but the interconnect is one of the two distinguishing features of a supercomputing-class cluster; the other is high-performance shared storage (which of course requires the interconnect to function).

[greglindahl]

You're explaining high speed networking to the system architect of infinipath :)

[stonogo]

It's a shame feel like I need to. There's no world where high-speed interconnects are as cheap as ethernet, nor is there a world where it is appropriate to replace them with ethernet. Congratulations on your successes but they're not really relevant to the accuracy of your post.

[redblacktree]

and me