BSP Clusters: High Performance, Reliable And Very Low Cost

We describe a transport protocol suitable for BSPlib programs running on a cluster of PCs connected by a 100Mbps Ethernet switch. The protocol provides a reliable packet-delivery mechanism that uses global knowledge of a program's communication pattern to maximise the performance of the switch. The performance is comparable to previous low-latency protocols on similar hardware, but the addition of reliability means that this protocol can be directly used by application software. For a modest budget of $US20,000 it is possible to build a machine that outperforms an IBM SP2 on all the NAS benchmarks (BT +80%, SP +70%, MG +9%, and LU +65% improvement), and an SGI Origin 2000 on half (BT +10, SP-24%, MG +10%, and LU-28%). The protocol has a CPU overhead of 1:5¯s for packet download and 3:6¯s for upload. Small packets can be communicated through the switch in a pipelined fashion every 21¯s. Application-to-application one-way latency is 29¯s plus the latency of the switch. A raw link bandwid..