Distributed computing with parallel networking

Abstract

For many large scientific applications, computing on a cluster is a viable, economical alternative to a dedicated parallel machine. Application performance on a cluster is largely determined by the speed of the underlying communication network. The authors use a parallel network approach to improve the communication network performance. More specifically, they use multiple networks based on Ethernet to improve the performance. The authors modified the parallel virtual machine (PVM) environment to take advantage of multiple Ethernets by using round robin scheduling strategy. The modified PVM, referred as PPVM, showed an improvement of 35% over PVM under no background load, and an improvement of 100% under background load on two channels.<>