DocumentCode :
2540597
Title :
A comparison of 4X InfiniBand and Quadrics Elan-4 technologies
Author :
Brightwell, Ron ; Doerfler, Douglas ; Underwood, Keith D.
Author_Institution :
Sandia Nat. Labs., Sandia Corp., Albuquerque, NM, USA
fYear :
2004
fDate :
20-23 Sept. 2004
Firstpage :
193
Lastpage :
204
Abstract :
Quadrics Elan-4 and 4X InfiniBand have comparable performance in terms of peak bandwidth and ping-pong latency. In contrast, the two network architectures differ dramatically in details ranging from signaling technologies to programming interface design to software stacks. Both networks compete in the high performance computing marketplace, and InfiniBand is currently receiving a significant amount of attention, due mostly to its potential cost/performance advantage. This work compares 4X InfiniBand and Quadrics Elan-4 on identical compute hardware using application benchmarks of importance to the DOE community. We use scaling efficiency as the main performance metric, and we also provide a cost analysis for different network configurations. Although our 32-node test platform is relatively small, some scaling issues are evident. In general, the Quadrics hardware scales slightly better on most of the applications tested.
Keywords :
benchmark testing; multiprocessor interconnection networks; network interfaces; performance evaluation; workstation clusters; 32-node test platform; 4X InfiniBand; Quadrics Elan-4; application benchmarks; cost analysis; high performance computing; interface design; network architectures; network configurations; peak bandwidth; performance metric; ping-pong latency; signaling technologies; software stacks; Bandwidth; Computer applications; Computer architecture; Costs; Delay; Hardware; High performance computing; Signal design; Software design; Testing;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Cluster Computing, 2004 IEEE International Conference on
ISSN :
1552-5244
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-8694-9
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/CLUSTR.2004.1392617
Filename :
1392617
Link To Document :
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