The Cluster Box has two SFF-8643 ports on the back, can these be used to daisy-chain multiple boxes? If yes, would that provide any benefit over traditional networking?
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Hello Winden,
Apologies for the delay in responding.
Currently, the SFF-8643 ports of the Cluster Box are reserved for internal debugging and inaccessible to users. Daisy-chaining for clustering multiple Cluster Boxes is not supported at the moment. However, the Cluster Box is undergoing hardware revision, including port optimization. Further details will be announced in the future.
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How long until the new version of the Cluster Box is expected to be available?
The new version of the Control Board is already available at Mixtile. Instead of the MiniSAS sockets, it is now equipped with a USB-C jack and an OCuLink connector. So I don’t know whether this arrangement allows for coupling more than two cluster boxes.
I don’t see the OCuLink connector on the site - is that the default configuration if you buy a cluster box now? And, if so, can we cluster two cluster boxes?
Thx
Apparently, the OCuLink connector now comes as part of the control board of the cluster box. Whether you can couple two cluster boxes? I don’t know, but as OCuLink is just an external PCIe link, you can only add a peripheral (like a graphis card or a network card) in an external case to your cluster.
You cannot, the 8 lanes going to the port are upstream only. They can however be connected to another computer acting as the PCIe root and (with a custom driver I don’t believe exists yet) basically replace the existing MIPS processor on the daughter board. You could then add multiple cluster boards to the one computer and bridge the interfaces together.
This reduces the usability of the OCuLink port quite much. I’m afraid it’s a limitation (or a design flaw?) of the processor used on the control board. If it was a downstream port, you could attach an external case with a graphics or network card.
The only alternative I can think about is to use the miniPCIe slots on the nodes themselves. They are not the fastest, and you’ll have to modify the tray to get the cable out.
Not quite. If they were downstream lanes, you could add a GPU to the MIPS processor that the cluster board runs because it’s the PCIe root. I don’t know how much utility any PCIe device would have with that CPU and a single lane to it. The OCuLink port allows one to bypass that control board for debugging from my understanding.
You don’t need no OCuLink for debugging. There’s a low-voltage UART header both on each node, and on the control board to get a serial console. If necessary, you’ve gotta add a MAX232, mill a hole into the tray, and place a DB9 socket.