filename    : 391.abstract
entry       : techreport

author      : Christian Kurmann, Felix Rauch, Thomas M. Stricker
title       : Cost/Performance Tradeoffs in Network Interconnects for Clusters of Commodity PCs
institution : ETH Zürich
number      : 391
year        : 2003
type        : Technical Report

address     : Parallel and Distributed Systems Group
month       : Jan
note        : 
language    : English
keywords    : Clusters of commodity PC, Ethernet, Myrinet, switch performance, application performance, full bisection bandwidth, all-to-all communication.
pages       : 16

abstract    : 

The definition of a commodity component is quite obvious when it comes
to the PC as a basic compute engine and building block for clusters of
PCs. Looking at the options for a more or less performant interconnect
between those compute nodes it is much less obvious which interconnect
still qualifies as commodity and which not. We are trying to answer
this question based on an in-depth analysis of a few common more or
less expensive interconnects on the market. Our measurements and
observations are based on the experience of architecting, procuring
and installing Xibalba, a 128 node - 192 processor versatile cluster
for a variety of research applications in the CS department of ETH
Zurich.

We define our unique way to measure the performance of an interconnect
and use our performance characterization to find the best cost
performance point for networks in PC clusters. Since our work is tied
to the purchase of a machine at fair market value we can also reliably
comment on cost performance of the four types of interconnects we
considered. We analyze the reason for performance and non-performance
for different Fast Ethernet architectures with a set of
micro-benchmarks and conclude our study with performance numbers of
some applications. Thus, the reader gets an idea about the impact of
the interconnect on the overall application performance in commodity
PC clusters.