Performance assessment of four cluster interconnects on identical hardware: hints for cluster builders

With the current popularity of cluster computing, the importance of understanding the capabilities and performance potential of the various network interconnects they use is growing. In this paper, we extend work done by other researchers by presenting the results of a performance analysis of multiple network interconnects running identical applications on identical cluster nodes. Repeated isolated timing runs of a number of standard cluster computing benchmarks (including the NAS parallel benchmarks (Bailey et al., 1991) and the Pallas benchmarks (Pallas Corp., 1999)) as well as some real world parallel applications on first and second generation Myrinet (Boden et al., 1995), SCI (IEEE, 1992), Fast (100Mbps) and Gigabit (1000Mbps) Ethernet were made and the results are reported. Such results are particularly valuable for computational scientists who are now, thanks to the low cost of such systems and the growing availability of relatively simple cluster tools (e.g. (Ferri, 2002)), able to build their own clusters but who may have relatively limited technical expertise concerning available cluster interconnects.