High performance communication using a commodity network for cluster systems

Abstract

Proposes a scheme to realize a high-performance communication facility using a commodity network. This scheme does not require any special hardware or hardware-specific device drivers in order to adapt to many kinds of network interface cards (NICs). In this scheme, a reliable lightweight network protocol is handled directly on a data link layer called by a network device driver. An interrupt reaping technique is proposed to eliminate the hardware interrupt overhead when an application waits for a message. PM/Ethernet, an instance of the scheme, is implemented on Linux with minimal modification to the Linux kernel, and existing network device drivers are used without any modification. Using Pentium III 500-MHz PCs on Packet Engine's G-NIC II Gigabit Ethernet NIC, it achieves 77.5 MB/s bandwidth and 37.6 /spl mu/s round-trip time latency compared to that of TCP/IP, which achieves 46.7 MB/s bandwidth and 89.6 /spl mu/s round-trip time latency. The NAS parallel benchmark IS results show that MPI on PM/Ethernet achieves 75% better performance than MPI on TCP/IP and is 7.8% slower than that of MPI on Myrinet PM.