Infiniband vs 10GBE

[Draex]

Asked this on twitter a couple of times during the last live stream, but are wondering what people's thoughts are on using Infiniband either point to point or with a switch over 10GB Ethernet due to the cost savings. I can outfit my whole house for what seams like about $1500 with used Infiniband VS $3000ish for used 6 Port 10GBE Switch.

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/HP-InfiniBand-4X-DDR-PCI-E-0-Memory-Dual-Port-HCA-Card-483513-B21-/370712268719?pt=US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item56502c4faf

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Flextronics-F-X430046-24-Port-4x-DDR-Infiniband-Switch-Used-/350679145306?pt=UK_Computing_NetworkSwitches_RL&hash=item51a61b1b5a

[Dragon_Cannon]

The things that you have selected will actually perform faster than 10GBE. You have selected the 4x DDR stuff which is rated for 16Gb/s throughput as apposed to the 10Gb/s ethernet equipment.

The other thing to think of is do you need that kind of data transmission speeds through your house. The only reason that you would need those kinds of speed would be if you were doing things that required high data transfer over a network like video editing with the files stored one place and the computer that you are using in another.

​Neither 10Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand will improve your internet speeds.

[Dragon_Cannon]

The other thing that you have to consider is that it is not a wide spread standard like ethernet so the long the distance of cable that you need to run the more it will cost.

[Draex]

Well aware of the the cost of the infiniband cables and there length limit of 30ft. My media vault has reached obscene sizes at this point (40TB and growing) mostly comprised of BDRips, and 4K Raw Video.

The plan if I can make it work is to use some kind of 4K Upscaler, Possibly an AVR or the Oppo 105 to take my 1080P Source Material and produce a hopefully decent 4K output, and then recapture it with the Blackmagic Decklink 4K Extreme. The Capture machine would need to be able to read and write to my server far in excess of normal gigabit speeds, which is why I am looking into this in the first place. This all pretty much comes back to another project of mine, using 4 Budget 1080P Projectors to create the effect of one 4K Projector, (Hopefully costing about $6K vs $25K for the cheapest native 4K projectors.)

[Swoosh]

I dont think we are very far away from 10Gbit ethernet becoming a lot more affordable, infiniband might edge the transfer rate at the moment, but if you are wanting longevity I would go for the ethernet option, it has far greater platform support and will be a better basis to upgrade on in the future. Ethernet hardware is a lot more openly available, you might struggle at times to get a IB card at a reasonable price.

[Cheesebaron]

I would personally go for outfitting the house with CAT6 or CAT7 (Class F or Class Fa (Fa can carry 40GBps at lengths of 50m)) and settle with 10GB interfaces for now. Why? Ethernet is more available and in the long run more affordable.

[LaiLaiNoob]

Singapore just got NGNB, I'd say another 10 years before consumers really need 10Gb ethernet... Even then, our hard drives/ssds would be a bottleneck. (Unless you RAID everything and create a monster array.)

[dianqing]

Singapore just got NGNB, I'd say another 10 years before consumers really need 10Gb ethernet... Even then, our hard drives/ssds would be a bottleneck. (Unless you RAID everything and create a monster array.)

When 4k arrives,that's will be what we need.Nowdays HDD/SDD won't perform that much faster,unless a RAMdisk???