Interconnect performance evaluation of SGI Altix 3700 BX2, Cray XI, Cray Opteron Cluster, and Dell PowerEdge

Author

Fatoohi, Rod ; Saini, Subhash ; Ciotti, Robert

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Eng., San Jose State Univ., CA

fYear

2006

fDate

25-29 April 2006

Abstract

We study the performance of inter-process communication on four high-speed multiprocessor systems using a set of communication benchmarks. The goal is to identify certain limiting factors and bottlenecks with the interconnect of these systems as well as to compare these interconnects. We measured network bandwidth using different numbers of communicating processors and communication patterns - such as point-to-point communication, collective communication, and dense communication patterns. The four platforms are: a 512-processor SGIAltix 3700 BX2 shared-memory machine with 3.2 GB/s links; a 64-processor (single-streaming) Cray XI shared-memory machine with 32 1.6 GB/s links; a 128-processor Cray Opteron cluster using a Myrinet network; and a 1280-node Dell PowerEdge cluster with an InfiniBand network. Our results show the impact of the network bandwidth and topology on the overall performance of each interconnect

Keywords

multiprocessing systems; multiprocessor interconnection networks; performance evaluation; workstation clusters; Cray Opteron Cluster; Cray XI; Dell PowerEdge; InfiniBand network; Myrinet network; SGI Altix 3700 BX2; collective communication; communication benchmarks; dense communication pattern; high-speed multiprocessor systems; interconnect performance evaluation; interprocess communication; network bandwidth; point-to-point communication; shared-memory machine; Application software; Bandwidth; Delay; High performance computing; Kernel; Message passing; NASA; Network topology; Power engineering and energy; Power engineering computing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2006. IPDPS 2006. 20th International

Conference_Location

Rhodes Island

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0054-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPDPS.2006.1639632

Filename

1639632