COMPaS: a PC-based SMP cluster

82 IEEE Concurrency R symmetric multiprocessor systems have become widely available, both as computational servers and as platforms for high-performance parallel computing. The same trend is found in PCs—some have also become SMPs with many CPUs in one box. Clusters of PC-based SMPs are expected to be compact, cost-effective parallel-computing platforms. At the Real World Computing Partnership, we have built a PC-based SMP cluster, COMPaS (Cluster of MultiProcessor Systems),1 as the next-generation cluster-computing platform (see the sidebar). Our objective is to study the performance characteristics of a PC-based SMP cluster and the programming models and methods for an SMP cluster. There have been many other research efforts in cluster computing, including the Illinois High Performance Virtual Machines project (http://www.csag.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/clusters. html), the Berkeley NOW project,2 and Jazznet (http://math. nist.gov/jazznet/index.html). However, few researchers have studied a homogeneous, mediumscale PC-based SMP cluster like our COMPaS.