Charles D. Norton
Charles.D.Norton@jpl.nasa.gov
Thomas A. Cwik
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
We explore the current capabilities of the recently released Myricom
2000 switch, using MPICH-GM for communication, on a 2-way SMP Pentium
III Beowulf-Class cluster. Performance measurements indicate that data
transfer rates of approximately 225 Mbytes/s with 9.3 microseconds
latency for ping-pong tests can be achieved for messages as large as
32 Mbytes. When shared-memory communication is used approximately 130
MBytes/s with 1.5 microseconds latency for long messages (250 MBytes/s
peak) is possible. The performance varies depending on how processors
communicate; either within an SMP node or across nodes. Performance
for parallel unstructured adaptive refinement of 3D tetrahedral meshes
shows noticeable improvement when compared to 100BaseT
Ethernet. Furthermore, when compared to traditional systems such as
the SGI Origin 2000, the combination of this fast network with high
performance SMP processors demonstrate that Beowulf-Clusters compare
favorably with such systems--even for communication intensive
applications.