A power-aware, application-based performance study of modern commodity cluster interconnection networks

Microbenchmarks have long been used to assess the performance characteristics of high-performance networks. It is generally assumed that microbenchmark results indicate the parallel performance of real applications. This paper reports the results of performance studies using real applications in a strictly controlled environment with different networks. In particular, we compare the performance of Myrinet and InfiniBand, and analyze them with respect to microbenchmark performance, real application performance and power consumption.