Challenging Applications on Fast Networks

Parallel computing on clusters of workstations is attractive because of the low costs in comparison to MPPs, but the speed of the local area network limits the class of applications that can be run efficiently. Fortunately, faster network technology is becoming available for the next generation of workstation clusters. This paper studies the effect of running challenging applications that communicate heavily on three types of modern interconnects: 100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet, 155 Mbit/s ATM, and 1.28 Gbit/s Myrinet. Experimental results show that even challenging communicationintensive applications can achieve acceptable performance on workstation clusters, but only if the communication software has been designed and tuned for high performance.