[NTLUG:Discuss] Ethernet Switches

[Steve Baker]

On a similar topic (switches versus hubs)...

One of the applications I've been working on uses exclusively broadcast
mode UDP messages - presumably in that context, I wouldn't benefit from
paying the extra and getting a switch instead of a cheap hub.  I recollect
hearing somewhere that some switches don't even support broadcast at all -
or do it very slowly by sending the message consecutively to all the outputs
instead of to all of them in parallel.

Does anyone know if that's true?  And if so, whether there is a way to tell
which switches support broadcast 'properly' and which either do it nastily
or not at all?

Right now, I'm only using a handful of machines - but what if I wanted to
connect up (say) 200 machines and use broadcast to all of them in parallel?
I'm betting there aren't too many 200 port *hubs* out there - can I cascade
them?  Is this where a 'bridge' would be appropriate?

Low latency and high bandwidth are important here - I'll be looking for a way
to do this with 1GHz Ethernet too.

(This is a *really* specialised Beowulf-like Linux application)

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
Mail : <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>   WorkMail: <sjbaker at link.com>
URLs : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
       http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net
       http://prettypoly.sf.net http://freeglut.sf.net
       http://toobular.sf.net   http://lodestone.sf.net