Design and implementation of CC-NUMA card II for SCI-based PC clustering

Abstract

It is extremely important to minimize network access time when constructing a high-performance PC cluster system. For an SCI-based PC cluster it is possible to reduce the network access time by maintaining network cache in each cluster node. This paper presents the second version CC-NUMA card (CC-NUMA card II) that utilizes network cache for SCI-based PC clustering. The CC-NUMA card II is directly plugged into the PCI slot of each node, and contains shared memory, network cache, a shared memory control module and network control module. The network cache is maintained for shared memory on the PCI bus of cluster nodes. The coherency mechanism between network cache and shared memory is based on the IEEE SCI standard. In previous research, the first version CC-NUMA card (CC-NUMA card I) was developed. The CC-NUMA card I adopting Dolphin's PCI-SCI card as the network control module caused overhead in exchanging data between the remote nodes. In this paper, the overhead is removed by developing the CC-NUMA card II that combines the shared memory control module and network control module in a single card. Throughout the experiment with the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite, the CC-NUMA card II based PC cluster shows better performance than a NUMA system based on Dolphin's PCI-SCI card.