A design study of alternative network topologies for the Beowulf parallel workstation

Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing Pub Date : 1996-08-06 DOI:10.1109/HPDC.1996.546233

Chance Reschke, T. Sterling, Daniel Ridge, D. Savarese, D. Becker, P. Merkey

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引用次数: 64

Abstract

Coupling PC based commodity technology with distributed computing methodologies provides on important advance in the development of single user dedicated systems. Beowulf is a class of experimental parallel workstations developed to evaluate and characterize the design space of this new operating point in price performance. A key factor determining the realizable performance under real world workloads is the means devised for interprocessor communications. A study has been performed to characterize a family of interconnect topologies feasible with low cost mass market network technologies. Behavior sensitivities to packet size and traffic density are determined. Findings are presented which compare more complex segmented topologies to the earlier parallel "channel bonded" scheme. It is shown that in many circumstances the more complex topologies perform better, and in some circumstances software routing techniques compare favorably to more expensive hardware switch mechanisms.

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贝奥武夫并行工作站的备选网络拓扑设计研究

将基于PC的商品技术与分布式计算方法相结合，为单用户专用系统的开发提供了重要的进展。Beowulf是一类实验性并行工作站，旨在评估和表征这一新的操作点在价格性能上的设计空间。在实际工作负载下决定可实现性能的一个关键因素是为处理器间通信设计的手段。一项研究已经完成了表征一个家族的互连拓扑可行的低成本的大众市场网络技术。确定行为对数据包大小和流量密度的敏感性。研究结果提出了比较更复杂的分割拓扑较早的并行“通道键合”方案。结果表明，在许多情况下，更复杂的拓扑执行得更好，并且在某些情况下，软件路由技术比更昂贵的硬件交换机制更有利。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing

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