Exploring The Performance Of The Myrinet Pc-Cluster On Linux

Both the Infiniband and the virtual interface architecture (VIA) aim at providing effective cluster communication. However, the specification of the former does not define APIs. It contains an abstract description of the protocol verbs. The dependence of an implementation on the various features of the hardware, firmware, and software are not defined in the Infiniband architecture specification making it difficult to implement now. VIA is a standard mechanism architecture independent from physical layer to deliver performance directly to applications. Existing implementations of VIA come in three flavours, one of these implementations based on the Myricom's Myrinet intelligent NIC is examined in this paper. The paper further presents a series of experiments on the communication performance of three different Myrinet PC-cluster on Linux. The experimental results obtained show that while there is a substantial difference of performance between Myrinet 2 and Myrinet 2000 boards, there is no significant minimum latency difference between the two borads because of the overhead of the PCI bus. It was further observed that there is no significance difference in performance on the different platforms tested using Myrinet 2000 board