The photos below were taken during evaluation tests of channel-bonding. Channel bonding is essentially a low-level load balancing technique that is accomplished by combining two (or more) ethernet interfaces into one logical interface. Our tests showed that for the types of codes were are running on the cluster, the performance benefits were relatively small, and were greatly outweighed by the costs of additional network switches, and the added complexity involved with maintaining this type of configuration. Therefore, this endeavor was abandoned.
The racks are cabled up for channel bonding tests. Each system has two ethernet
network connections that connect to two different Cisco switches mounted in the middle
of each rack. This cabling is very temporary and would have been re-run in a much neater
manner had the testing worked out. The orange wires are multi-mode fiber connections
for the gigabit ethernet uplinks connecting each switch to the main gigabit ethernet
switch (which is currently located in the left-most rack).
This is the front of the system. The extreme angles of this photo and the photo
below are due to the system sitting so close to the front glass of the machine room.
This isn't very conducive to photography, but is required due to the current space
constraints.
This is the front from the other side. We had an extremely difficult time finding the brushed aluminum blank faceplates that we wanted to cover the gaps in the middle of the racks. We have ordered some, but they haven't yet arrived.