Title :
An evaluation of the Myrinet/GM2 two-port networks
Author :
Zamani, Reza ; Qian, Ying ; Afsahi, Ahmad
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Queen´´s Univ., Canada
Abstract :
It is important to systematically assess the features and performance of the new interconnects for high performance clusters. This work presents the performance of the two-port Myrinet networks at the GM2 and MPI layers using a complete set of microbenchmarks. We also present the communication characteristics and the performance of the NAS multi-zone benchmarks and SMG2000 application under the MPI and MPI-OpenMP programming paradigms. We found that the host overhead is very small in our cluster, and the Myrinet is sensitive to the buffer reuse patterns. Our applications achieved a better performance for MPI than the mixed-mode. All the applications studied use only nonblocking communications, thus are able to overlap their communications with the computations. Our experiments show that the two-port communication at the GM and MPI levels (except for the RDMA read, and overlap) outperforms the one-port communication for the bandwidth. However, this did not translate into a considerable improvement at least for our applications.
Keywords :
application program interfaces; buffer storage; message passing; parallel programming; performance evaluation; system buses; two-port networks; MPI; Myrinet/GM2; NAS multi-zone benchmarks; OpenMP programming; SMG2000; buffer reuse patterns; communication characteristics; high performance clusters; host overhead; microbenchmarks; nonblocking communications; two-port networks; Application software; Availability; Bandwidth; Communication system software; Computer networks; Engines; Middleware; Multiprocessor interconnection networks; Parallel programming; Sun;
Conference_Titel :
Local Computer Networks, 2004. 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2260-2
DOI :
10.1109/LCN.2004.20