Micro-benchmarks and Performance Comparision of High-Speed Interconnects
Today's distributed and high performance applications require high
computational power as well as high communication performance. In the past
few years, the computational power of commodity PCs has been doubling about
every eighteen months. At the same time, network interconnects that provide
very low latency and very high bandwidth are also emerging. This trend makes
it very promising to build high performance computing environments by
clustering. Currently, there are several network interconnects, such as
Myrinet, Quadrics, and InfiniBand, that provide low latency and high bandwidth.
To compare throughly these interconnects, we have designed a set of
micro-benchmarks, which characterizes different aspects of the interconnects.
Our micro-benchmarks include not only traditional performance measurements
such as latency and bandwidth measurements but also tests that are more
relevant to networks that provide user-level mode access. Our benchmarks also
concentrate on the remote memory access capabilities provided by each
interconnect.