language: en

MPI-FM: High Performance MPI on Workstation Clusters

Mario Lauria
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universita di Napoli "Federico II"
via Claudio 21 80125 Napoli, Italy
lauria@nadis.dis.unina.it.
Andrew Chien
Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1304 W. Springfield Ave. Urbana, IL 61801, USA
achien@cs.uiuc.edu

Abstract Despite the emergence of high speed LANs, the communication performance available to applications on workstation clusters still falls short of that available on MPPs. A new generation of efficient messaging layers is needed to take advantage of the hardware performance and to deliver it to the application level. Communication software is the key element in bridging the communication performance gap separating MPPs and workstation clusters. MPI-FM is a high performance implementation of MPI for networks of workstations connected with a Myrinet network, built on top of the Fast Messages (FM) library. Based on the FM version 1.1 released in Fall 1995, MPI-FM achieves a minimum one-way latency of 19 s and a peak bandwidth of 17.3 MByte/s with common MPI send and receive function calls. A direct comparison using published performance figures shows that MPI-FM running on SPARCstation 20 workstations connected with a relatively inexpensive Myrinet network outperforms the MPI implementations available on the IBM SP2 and the Cray T3D, both in latency and in bandwidth, for messages up to 2 KByte in size.

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