NDLI: Cost/performance tradeoffs in network interconnects for clusters of commodity PCs

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Kurmann, C. Rauch, F. Stricker, T.M.
Copyright Year	2003
Description	Author affiliation: Lab. for Comput. Syst., ETH - Swiss Inst. of Technol., Zurich, Switzerland (Kurmann, C.; Rauch, F.; Stricker, T.M.)
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.
Sponsorship	IEEE Comput. Soc Tech. Committee on Parallel Process. IEEE Comput. Soc. Tech. Committee on Comput. Archit. IEEE Comput. Soc. Tech. Committee on Distrib. Process. ACM SIGARCH
File Size	356872
File Format	PDF
ISBN	0769519261
ISSN	15302075
DOI	10.1109/IPDPS.2003.1213360
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2003-04-22
Publisher Place	France
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Costs Intelligent networks Personal communication networks Ethernet networks Concurrent computing Computer networks Switches Bandwidth Workstations Computer architecture
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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