I'm wondering if anyone on the gluster team has heard of a project called GAMMA? It's a communication framework that runs over gig-e and reduces latency to near infiniband levels (reported at 9.6 microseconds). :-0 I just heard of it today and I'm wondering if it would be a candidate for inclusion with gluster. It has a published specification and it seems to me that it's similar to infiniband... It doesn't do IP at all, and in fact requires a separate IP network for certain overhead communications. But given the huge price premium for IB networks, I would think that a GAMMA translator would put GlusterFS way over the top as a price to performance leader in the super storage market. We're talking about getting serious I/O out of plain old gig ethernet! Opinions? The GAMMA project is here: http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma/ And the article where I read about it was on Linux Magazine's site: http://www.linux-mag.com/launchpad/business-class-hpc/build/3507 The excerpt that matters: "For HPC clusters it is worth mentioning that kernel by-pass is available for GigE. The GAMMA or Genoa Active Message MAchine is a project maintained by Giuseppe Ciaccio of Dipartimento di Informatica s Scienze dell'Informazione in Italy. It is a project to develop an Ethernet kernel bypass capability for some Intel and Broadcom Ethernet NICs. MPI/GAMMA is also available. As we will see in Table One, GAMMA can provide a low latency for some GigE NICs." To give credit where credit is due, the author is Jeffrey B. Layton, Ph.D., and it was a great article about the merits of various interconnects. Thanks guys, looking forward to your thoughts! Chris
