Wednesday, July 25, 2007

MPICH.NT, MPICH2, and TCP Offloading (continued)

Well we tried updated drivers for the NC373i but with no avail. We were still seeing TOE errors which resulted in MPICH.NT and MPICH2 hanging. Luckily the machines have second NIC's, NC380T PCIe DP Multifunc Gigabit Server Adapters. Unluckily for us, those network cards exhibited the same problem as the embedded NC373i.

This leads me to believe that there is a problem with the Windows 2003 R2 Scalable Networking Pack. Specifically with the Chimney TCP Offloading portion. There may even be an issue in MPICH.NT and MPICH2 and Windows 2003 R2's SNP. However, that just seems highly unlikely as MPICH.NT and MPICH2 are wildly different under the hood.

We've initiated a case with Microsoft to get to the bottom of this issue. Meanwhile our new servers have TOE disabled, which isn't bad, but it isn't good either.

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