Dear fellow infiniband users,
I will try and cut my long infiniband story short, so here it goes: Within our small company we are working on separate workstations. We're in the film business so quite a lot of data is send from workstation to workstation. A while back i started to look into using infiniband as a network protocol to improve our network speeds for moving data. I bought some very cheap stuff on eBay; a DDR switch (a Topspin) and 5 infiniband DDR cards, I think they are HP branded. Two of our workstations were already fitted with infiniband, I don't know the make.
Now our workstations used to run XP (yes…) and to complete surprise I actually got things working and was moving data across within a day. Victory. I didn’t get extreme speeds though but at least it worked and it worked faster dan our gigabit network, obviously.
Now I know DDR should connect on 20Gbps (correct?), but whatever I tried the connection always indicated 10Gbps.
A while back almost all workstation were upgraded to Windows 7. I always understood that setting up infiniband would be even easier in Win7. I have downloaded drivers etc. But unfortunately I never got it to work. All of the Win7 stations install the card and software ‘correctly’ but when I try and manually start the opensm service (on XP that used to be the trick), it always fails. The computer indicates ‘the device cannot start’. This is the same for all the Win7 systems. The cards have not moved slots.
So a couple of questions:
- is this a known problem for Win7 machines and is there a solution?
- is there maybe something I am forgetting, or do I need to follow a different route or workflow?
- Can anyone point me in the right direction for drivers / software?
- Is it at all possible to connect on 20Gbps using IPoIB?
So, now y'all know that I am not an expert, I kindly ask for some help. I am prepared to follow any instructions. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction or to a person who is in a similar situation and got it working. Also I would be prepared to setup a Teamviewer connection and allow anyone with more experience than me access.
I know I am asking a lot but I am quite eager to get it working. So thank you in advance!
Cheers,
Jef Grosfeld