Comparing InfiniBand based Clustered Servers with Gigabit Clustered Servers

This short paper compares the performance between a InfiniBand based Cluster and an older Gigabit-based cluster. The InfiniBand interconnect provides high bandwidth, low latency links between both compute nodes and storage system which gives good parallel scalability. The linpack benchmark scales linearly up to the full 208 processors. Although InfiniBand is not considered a commodity interconnect, it is shown that for both parallel compute scalability and storage IO scalability it is a significant improvement on Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. The benchmark shows the evolution of the hardware in the last few years, and illustrates an example of achieving scalability with standard hardware and open software.