Benchmarking a network of PCs running parallel applications

We present a benchmarking study that compares the performance of a network of four PCs connected by 100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet running three different system software configurations: TCP/IP on Windows NT, TCP/IP on Linux and a light weight message passing protocol (U-Net Active messages) on Linux. For each configuration, we report results for communication micro-benchmarks and the NAS parallel benchmarks. For the NAS benchmarks, the overall running time using Linux TCP/IP was 12 to 500 percent less than the Windows NT TCP/IP configuration. Likewise, the Linux U-Net based message passing protocol outperformed the Linux TCP/IP version by 5 to over 200 percent. We also show that using Linux U-Net we are able to achieve 125 micro-second latency between two processe