Communication middleware systems for heterogeneous clusters: a comparative study

Author

Balkanski, Daniel ; Trams, Mario ; Rehm, Wolfgang

Author_Institution

Fakultat fur Informatik, Technische Univ. Chemnitz, Germany

fYear

2003

fDate

1-4 Dec. 2003

Firstpage

504

Lastpage

507

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study of the communication middleware systems suitable for aggregating computational clusters with heterogeneous incompatible SANs into a common cluster of clusters (CoC). Being interested mainly in solutions providing the programmer with some single, portable and widely accepted parallel programming model like the message passing interface (MPI), we have narrowed down our choices to a few alternatives: PACX, MPI, MPICH-Madeleine III and MPICH-G2. besides a brief overview of these three alternatives the paper presents our experiences and benchmark results by using two of them: PACX-MPI and MPICH/Madeleine III in the heterogeneous CoC setup consisting of two subclusters equipped with Myrinet, SCI, and Gigabit Ethernet.

Keywords

message passing; middleware; network operating systems; parallel programming; storage area networks; workstation clusters; Gigabit Ethernet; MPI; MPICH-G2; MPICH-Madeleine III; Myrinet; PACX; SCI; cluster of clusters; communication middleware systems; computational clusters; heterogeneous CoC setup; heterogeneous clusters; message passing interface; parallel programming model; Aggregates; Application software; Ethernet networks; Joining processes; Libraries; Message passing; Middleware; Network interfaces; Network operating systems; Parallel programming; Programming profession;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Cluster Computing, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2066-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CLUSTR.2003.1253359

Filename

1253359