Evaluation of cluster interconnects for a distributed shared memory

Clusters of Symmetrical Multiprocessors (SMPs) have recently become popular as low-cost, high-performance computing solutions. The type of interconnection hardware used in these clusters can become a deciding factor in their overall performance. This paper evaluates the performance of three different communication systems, 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps FastEthernet and 155 Mbps ATM, using a multithreaded Distributed Shared Memory system, Strings. The raw performance of each network is first measured using netperf. Ten different applications are then used for performance evaluation, including programs from the SPLASH-2 benchmarks, a medical computing application, and some computational kernels. It is found that half of the programs tested are not significantly affected by changes in the bandwidth. Though the ATM network provides the highest overall bandwidth, the remaining applications show that the increase in latency compared to FastEthernet prevents any performance improvement. On the other hand, applications that require only moderately high bandwidths perform substantially better with FastEthernet.