Performance Modeling and Analysis Of

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy PERFORMANCE MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF MULTICAST INFRASTRUCTURE FOR HIGH-SPEED CLUSTER AND GRID NETWORKS By Hakki Sarp Oral December 2003 Chair: Alan D. George Major Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering Cluster computing provides performance similar to that of supercomputers in a cost-effective way. High-performance, specialized interconnects increase the performance of clusters. Grid computing merges clusters and other geographically distributed resources in a user-transparent way. Collective communications, such as multicasting, increase the efficiency of cluster and Grid computing. Unfortunately, commercial high-performance cluster interconnects do not inherently support multicasting. Moreover, Grid multicasting schemes only support limited high-level applications, and do not target latency-sensitive applications. This dissertation addresses these problems to achieve efficient software-based multicast schemes for clusters. These schemes are also used for defining a universal multicast infrastructure for latency-sensitive Grid applications. The first phase of research focuses on analyzing the multicast problem on high-performance, direct, torus networks for clusters. Key contributions are experimental