Analysis of Cluster Interconnection Network Topologies

Cluster computing provides an economical alternative for high performance computing, that in the past could only be provided by expensive parallel supercomputers. Clusters are built with standard components and interconnected by various interconnection topologies. These interconnection topologies provide different approaches for communication between processing nodes within the cluster. A study has been performed to evaluate the computing and network speeds of a cluster of nine computers consisting of a front-end and eight compute nodes interconnected in star, channel bonding, and flat neighborhood network topologies. For this task two applications were developed; one performs a data transfer test between two nodes and measures the round trip time of the transfer; the second application performs distributed matrix multiplication using all of the compute nodes. In addition the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark was utilized. These applications were applied with the cluster network configured using the three aforementioned topologies. Results show that 2-way channel bonding is the best alternative providing a peak performance of 12 GFLOPs. The Flat Neighborhood Network proved to be effective, but at a higher cost since at least one extra switch and one extra NIC for each processing node was required.