A Portable Method for Improving Available Bandwidth of PC Cluster

The Installation and maintenance costs of dedicated interconnection networks for PC cluster are still expensive, and they tend to increase the specializations and complexities because they use special hardware, protocols and libraries. Especially, a great deal of time and manpower are spent in porting the existing systems to their new environment. This paper proposes a simple and portable method, PMCME, that improves the PC cluster performance only by loading the proposed module. The existing systems can easily and cheaply introduce PMCME. The basic idea is that the performance of PC clusters increases by improving the total bandwidth of the streams running concurrently on each node even if the bandwidth of each stream does not increase. PMCME performs better than IEEE802.3ad (LACP) without the LACP supported switches. LACP performance is influenced by the network parameters such as IP address or MAC address because it uses them as hash key for distribution. On the other hand, PMCME shows the stable effect regardless of them.