Design and Evaluation of an HPVM-Based Windows NT Supercomputer

We describe the design and evaluation of a 192-processor Windows NT cluster for high performance computing based on the High Performance Virtual Machine (HPVM) communication suite. While other clusters have been described in the literature, building a 58 GFlop/s NT cluster to be used as a general-purpose production machine for NCSA required solving new problems. The HPVM software meets the challenges represented by the large number of processors, the peculiarities of the NT operating system, the need for a production-strength job submission facility, and the requirement for mainstream programming interfaces. First, HPVM provides users with a collection of standard APIs like MPI, Shmem, Global Arrays with supercomputer class performance (13 μs minimum latency, 84 MB/s peak bandwidth for MPI), efficiently deliverin