Performance Under Load

Generally speaking, better performance is provided by switched network interconnects, such as SCI, ATM, and Fibre Channel. Network interconnects with collision-based semantics should be avoided in situations where performance under load is important. Unswitched 10 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s Ethernet are the two most common examples of this type of network. While 10 Mbit/s Ethernet is almost certainly not adequate for any HPC application, a switched version of 100 Mbit/s Ethernet may be sufficient for some applications.