1. A Comparative Study of Network Protocols & Interconnect for Cluster Computing Performance Evaluation of Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet

2. Project Motivation Cluster Computing – currently most widely used parallel processing platform Commodity hardware - Inexpensive & Scalable Servers, Workstations or PCs interconnected with High Speed Network Example: Linux Beowulf Clusters

3. Networks for Clusters Interconnect Requirements  Very Low Latency (overheads)  Highest possible bandwidths  Scalability Performance of Interconnect architecture (hardware/protocols)  Overall Cluster Performance

4. Protocols & Interconnect Technologies Fast Ethernet (100 Mbits/s) Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbits/s) Myrinet (1.2-1.6 Gbits/s) Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) QsNet II (proprietary) Protocols  TCP/IP  GM (for Myrinet)  BIP (Basic Interface for Parallelism)

5. Project Goals A study of current network technologies for cluster computing Protocol Implementation (software) + Hardware Architecture

6. Project Goal – Performance Evaluation Measurement-Based Performance Evaluation of 3 available network architectures  Fast Ethernet  Gigabit Ethernet  Myrinet (to be available by June 2005)

7. Methodology Performance Evaluation  NAS Parallel Benchmarks Set  Custom code in MPI (MPICH 1.2.5) Experimentation Environment  8 P4 Workstations running Linux  Gigabit Ethernet Switch  Myrinet Switch Focus on Gigabit Ethernet & Myrinet based environment

8. Cluster Performance Benchmarks Peak Bandwidth & Latency Measurements Applications Performance Measurement MPI Performance over TCP/IP and other protocols

9. Work in Progress Background Study of Protocols, Switch & NIC Hardware and Benchmarks – In Progress Selection of Benchmarks, Coding of custom benchmarks – Remaining Actual Performance Measurements - Remaining