Title: Performance evaluation of the Sun Fire Link SMP clusters

Authors: Ying Qian, Ahmad Afsahi, Nathan R. Fredrickson, Reza Zamani

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada

Abstract: The interconnection networks and the communication system software are critical in achieving high performance in clusters. Sun Fire Link interconnect is a memory-based interconnect, where the Sun MPI uses the Remote Shared Memory (RSM) model for its user-level inter-node messaging. This paper presents the overall architecture of the Sun Fire Link and its messaging layer. We provide an in-depth performance evaluation of a Sun Fire Link cluster at the RSM, MPI, and application layers. The MPI ping-pong latency and bandwidth are five microseconds and 660 MB/s, respectively. In general, the Sun Fire Link cluster performs relatively well in most cases.

Keywords: system area networks; remote shared memory; RSM; multiprocessor clusters; performance evaluation; MPI; OpenMP; high performance computing; memory-based interconnect; Sun Fire Link.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2006.013476

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2006 Vol.4 No.5/6, pp.209 - 221

Published online: 01 May 2007 *

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