You can do InfiniBand on the desktop, but it necessarily doesn't give the performance you might be expecting. I think I read about this on HN originally... htt

You can do InfiniBand on the desktop, but it necessarily doesn't give the performance you might be expecting. I think I read about this on HN originally... http://www.davidhunt.ie/infiniband-at-home-10gb-networking-on-the-cheap/ http://www.davidhunt.ie/infiniband-at-home-10gb-networking-o... Edit: From the edit on the follow-up post about getting it working on Ubuntu: >Note: iperf maxed out at 1.2 gbps, and on the current linux install, I couldnt get netperf client working at all. netserver would work, but only showed a throughput of 25mbps from a Win7 client. HOWEVER, when I set up the raid with 6 old 160G drives, the “hdparm -t /dev/md0p1″ showed 250MB/sec reads, and I got the same from the Win7 machine using samba across the infiniband fabric. This seems to indicate that iperf and netperf are completely unreliable for testing this type of connection. Bear in mind though that I did have netperf running on the previous ubuntu install, but that installation was so messy I don’t know what drivers and user-space software was running. I reckon it’s the kind of think that may be fixed in the stock Ubuntu install in the near future. For the moment, just go with real-world testing, i.e. copying large files from ramdisk to ramdisk, for example.