Achieving a balanced low-cost architecture for mass storagemanagement through multiple fast Ethernet channels on the Beowulfparallel workstation

摘要

A network of workstations (NOW) seeks to leverage commercialnworkstation technology to produce high-performance computing systems atncosts appreciably lower than parallel computers specifically designednfor that purpose. The capabilities of technologies emerging from the PCncommodity mass market are rapidly evolving to converge with those ofnworkstations while at significantly lower cost. A new operating point innthe price-performance design space of parallel system architecture maynbe derived through parallelism of PC subsystems. Then“Pile-of-PCs” (PopC) approach is being explored through thenBeowulf parallel workstation, developed to provide order-of-magnitudenincreases in disk capacity and bandwidth for a single-user environmentnat costs commensurate with conventional high-end workstations. Thisnpaper explores a critical aspect of the architecture trade-off space fornBeowulf associated with the balance of parallel disk throughput andninternal network bandwidth. The findings presented demonstrate that thenparallel channels of a commodity 100 Mbps Ethernet are both necessarynand sufficient to support the data rates of multiple concurrent filentransfers on a 16-processor Beowulf parallel workstation