[Linux-cluster] Small Cluster, Port Trunking, To use switch or not?

[Frankie Montenegro]

Hi everyone,

I am building a small HPC cluster with two slaves and a master. I can
put together two slave nodes with under 350$ per node, so I don't want
to spend more then 70-80$ for networking.

Buying a gigabit ethernet 4 port switch would be the most
straightforward solution. However, I was hoping to get "port trunking"
set up,  and doubling the network speed. Since this is not supported
by switches that are within my budget, I wondered if I can achieve
port trunking without a switch, just
adding couple of   network cards to the master node  and having a
master node be a switch. WIll I be able to get 2Gbps or is this idea
completely idiotic?

Thanks,
F.