Benchmarking a network of PCs running parallel applications
| Title | Benchmarking a network of PCs running parallel applications |
| Publication Type | Conference Papers |
| Year of Publication | 1998 |
| Authors | Hollingsworth J, Guven E, Akinlar C |
| Conference Name | Performance, Computing and Communications, 1998. IPCCC '98., IEEE International |
| Date Published | 1998/02/16/18 |
| Publisher | IEEE |
| ISBN Number | 0-7803-4468-5 |
| Keywords | 100 Mbit/s, 125 mus, Aerodynamics, Application software, communication micro-benchmarks, default mathematical libraries, Delay, Ethernet, Ethernet networks, gcc, latency, lightweight message-passing protocol, Linux, Local area networks, mathematics computing, Message passing, microcomputer applications, Microsoft Windows NT, NAS parallel benchmarks, network operating systems, Numerical simulation, parallel applications, PARALLEL PROCESSING, PC network benchmarking, performance comparison, performance evaluation, Personal communication networks, Protocols, PVM, running time, software libraries, System software, system software configurations, TCP/IP, TCPIP, Transport protocols, U-Net active messages, Visual C++ |
| Abstract | Presents a benchmarking study that compares the performance of a network of four PCs connected by a 100 Mbit/s fast Ethernet running three different system software configurations: TCP/IP on Windows NT, TCP/IP on Linux and a lightweight message-passing protocol (U-Net active messages) on Linux. For each configuration, we report results for communication micro-benchmarks and the NAS (Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation) parallel benchmarks. For the NAS benchmarks, the overall running time using Linux TCP/IP was 12-500% less than the Windows NT TCP/IP configuration. Likewise, the Linux U-Net based message-passing protocol outperformed the Linux TCP/IP version by 5-200%+. We also show that, by using Linux U-Net, we are able to achieve 125 μs latency between two processes using PVM. Finally, we report that the default mathematical libraries supplied with NT (for both gcc and Visual C++) are substantially slower than the one supplied with Linux |
| DOI | 10.1109/PCCC.1998.659876 |