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Using dual Athlon XP 1400's in 6 systems, he plans to equal a 1998 top-of-the-line Cray for about $6000:
The solution was to put more cheap Ethernet cards in each PC, and then use "channel bonding" to make them all look like a single faster card. Dietz put four 100 megabit-per-second fast Ethernet cards in each PC. Each card has only one tenth the speed of a gigabit card, but not even gigabit Ethernet cards actually carry a billion bits per second. With channel bonding, it turns out that even using three cheap network cards per PC allows greater throughput than a single gigabit card. And fast Ethernet (10base-100) costs about three percent of gigabit Ethernet on a per-card basis, so using four cards per PC still saves 88 percent.
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