Giga-Plant Scalable Cluster

摘要

The Giga-Plant is a next generation compute cluster under construction within the Scalable Computing Laboratory (SCL). This work describes the general cluster design philosophy utilized on this machine and others, and illustrates the performance evaluation process that was exercised in order to make an informed harddware purchasing decision. We present network communication throughput results taken from several hardware platforms using Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet With and Without Jumbo Frames. We show that desipte throughput in excess of 800Mbit/s, communication latency is the critical factor in dtermining the viability of commodity network hadrware in parallel processing applications.