Comparing the communication performance and scalability of a Linuxand a NT cluster of PCs, a Cray origin 2000, an IBM SP and a CrayT3E-600

摘要

The paper presents scalability and communication performanceresults for a cluster of PCs running Linux with the GM communicationlibrary, a cluster of PCs running Windows NT with the HPVM communicationlibrary, a Cray T3E-600, an IBM SP and a Cray Origin 2000. Both PCclusters were using a Myrinet network. Six communication tests using MPIroutines were run for a variety of message sizes and numbers ofprocessors. The tests were chosen to represent commonly usedcommunication patterns with low contention (a ping-pong betweenprocessors, a right shift, a binary tree broadcast and a synchronizationbarrier) to communication patterns with high contention (a naivebroadcast and an all-to-all). For most of the tests, the T3E providesthe best performance and scalability. For an 8 byte message the NTcluster performs about the same as the T3E for most of the tests. Forall the tests but one, the T3E, the Origin and the SP outperform the twoclusters for the largest message size (10 Kbytes or 1 Mbyte)