Performance evaluation of the quadrics interconnection network

摘要

We present an initial performance evaluation of the Quadrics interconnectionnetwork (QNET). We describe the main hardware and software features of QNET of relevance to the system designer and to the end user. A benchmark methodology is proposed in which important performance and scalability parameters are included. Actual benchmarks are performed on an experimental cluster. Based on these benchmarks, a thorough performance analysis of the QNET is presented in the paper. The preliminary analysis indicates a remarkably good performance of the interconnect, such as user-level latency of 2.1 ps, a communication bandwidth of 200 MB/s with lV1j2 of 512 bytes, efficient support to collective communication patterns and good contention resolution under heavy traffic.