High Performance Communication using a Gigabit Ethernet

A high performance communication facility, called the GigaE PM, has been designed and implemented for parallel applications on clusters of computers using a Gigabit Ethernet. The GigaE PM provides not only a reliable high bandwidth and low latency communication function, but also supports existing network protocols such as TCP/IP. In the design of the GigaE PM, it is assumed that a Gigabit Ethernet card has a dedicated processor and its program can be modi ed. A reliable communication mechanism for a parallel application is implemented on the rmware while existing network protocols are handled by an operating system kernel. A prototype system has been implemented using an Essential Communications Gigabit Ethernet card. The performance results show that a 47.7 microseconds round trip time for a four bytes user message, and 58.3 MBytes/sec bandwidth for a 1,468 bytes message have been achieved on Intel Pentium 150MHz PCs. Table 1: Performance of TCP/IP on Gigabit Ethernet NIC Machine OS bandwidth Packet Enginge[4] DEC Alpha, 533 MHz Windows NT 29.6 MBytes/sec Essential Intel Pentium II, 333 MHz Windows NT 27.5 MBytes/sec Essential Intel Pentium II, 333 MHz Linux Redhat 5.0 26.3 MBytes/sec Essential Intel Pentium, 150 MHz Linux Redhat 5.0 12.0 MBytes/sec