MPI and embedded TCP/IP Gigabit Ethernet cluster computing

A group of lower cost PC connected via Gigabit Ethernet and using MPI for communications between multiple parallel processes running simultaneously on all hosts provides a cost effective and powerful computing solution. The processing load for interprocess communications via TCP is significant when the parallel processes must exchange a large amount of data. When using a standard gigabit network interface card (NIC), TCP communications at near wire speed (above 800 Mbit/sec) use almost the entire processing capacity of a 1 GHz Pentium 3 processor or around 30% of a 2.4 GHz Pentium IV. This communications overhead significantly reduces the computational power of economical two processor systems. NIC that perform the protocol processing on the card offer the possibility of reducing this significantly. This study evaluates the performance and cost effectiveness of using a NIC with embedded TCP/IP processing to offload the network processing and allow more MPI processes per host.