Communication Performance of Gigabit LAN Workstation Cluster RWC/WSC

This paper reports on the communication performance of the RWC/WSC. It is then compared with massively parallel machines: the CM5 and the Paragon. For comparison, specific collective communications primitives[4] such as broadcast and reduction are used, because they are commonly used in parallel programs, and are convenient for evaluating the performance of parallel systems. CG-kernel benchmark from NAS parallel benchmarks is also used to compare the RWC/WSC with the Paragon. The next section introduces the Myrinet, PM and the RWC/WSC briefly. In the third section, the performance of collective communications and the benchmark program of the RWC/WSC is compared with the CM-5 and the Paragon. We found that the performance of our PM is comparable to the MPP's in a 32 processor system