Performance Evaluation of Fast Ethernet, Giganet, and Myrinet on a Cluster

This paper evaluates the performance of three popular technologies used to interconnect machines on clusters: Fast Ethernet, Myrinet and Giganet. To achieve this purpose, we used the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Surprisingly, for the LU application, the performance of Fast Ethernet was better than Myrinet. We also evaluate the performance gains provided by VIA, a user lever communication protocol, when compared with TCP/IP, a traditional, stackedbased communication protocol. The impacts caused by the use of Remote DMA Write are also evaluated. The results show that Fast Ethernet, when combined with a high performance communication protocol, such as VIA, has a good cost-benefit ratio, and can be a good choice to connect machines on a small cluster environment where bandwidth is not crucial for applications.