Remote Shared Memory over Sun Fire Link Interconnect

The interconnection networks and the communication system software in clusters of multiprocessors are critical to achieving high performance. Recently, Sun Microsystems has introduced a new system area network, Sun Fire Link interconnect, for its Sun Fire cluster systems with some performance results at the MPI level. Sun Fire Link is a memory-based interconnect with layered system software components that implements a mechanism for user-level messaging based on direct-access to remote memory regions of other nodes. This is referred to as Remote Shared Memory (RSM). This paper assesses the performance of the interconnect at the RSM level, as well as MPI level. We present the performance of different Remote Shared Memory API primitives, and MPI pingpong latency over the Sun Fire Link interconnect on a cluster of Sun Fire 6800s. Our results indicate a better performance for the RSM put primitive than the get primitive for messages of larger than 64 bytes. We also compare the performance of Sun MPI implementation with the RSM level. Keyword System Area Networks, Remote Shared Memory, Clusters of Multiprocessors, Performance Evaluation, MPI