Abstract
Recent improvements in LANs make network of workstations a good alternative to traditional parallel computers in some applications. However, in this platform the communication performance is over two orders of magnitude inferior to state-of-art multiprocessors. Currently networking technologies have put the pressure in the software overhead. Because of this, applications could not take advantage of this communication performance potential. In this paper, we present an implementation of Virtual Circuit Caching that reduces the software overhead by allocating communication resource once and re-using them for multiple messages to the same destinations. With this approach, the communication overhead is reduced by approximately a 35% for long messages; this reduction should enable the extensive use of networks of workstations for scientific parallel applications.
This work was supported in part by the Spanish CICYT under Grant TIC97-0897-C04-03
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
D. Becker, T. Sterling, D. Savarese, J. Dorband, U. Ranawake, C. Packer: Beowulf: A Parallel Workstation for Scientific Computation. Procc. of Int. Conference on Parallel Processing, 1995.
G. Ciaccio: Optimal Communicationn Performance on Fast Ethernet with GAMMA. Procc. of the Workshop on Personal Computer Based Networks of Workstations, IPPS/SPDP, 1998.
D.E. Culler, L.T. Liu, R.P. Martin and C.O. Yoshikawa: Assessing Fast Network Interfaces. IEEE Micro, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 35–43, Feb. 1996.
B.V. Dao, S. Yalamanchili, and J. Duato: Architectural Support for Reducing Communication Overhead in Multiprocessor Interconnection Networks. Procc. of the Third Int. Symp. on High Performance Computer Architecture, February 1997.
T. Von Eicken et al: Active Messages: A Mechanism for Integrated Communication and Computation. Procc. of the 19th ISCA, pp. 256–266, May 1992.
A. Geist, A. Beguelin, J. Dongarra, W. Jiang, R. Manchek and V. Sunderam: PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine. The MIT Press, 1994.
W. Gropp, E. Lusk and A. Skjellum: Using MPI. The MIT Press, 1996.
R. Handel, M.N. Huber and S. Schroder: ATM Networks, Concepts, Protocols, Applications. Addison-Wesley 1994, 2/e.
Gigabit Ethernet Alliance. DRAFT Document for IEEE 802.3z Gigabit Ethernet Standard. http://www.gigabit-ethernet.org.
Real-time Message Passing Interface (MPI/RT) Forum: DRAFT Document for the Real-time Message Passing Interface (MPI/RT) Standard. http://www.mpirt.org, May 1998.
J. Piernas, A. Flores, J. M. García: Analyzing the Performance of MPI in a Cluster of Workstations base on Fast Ethernet. Procc. of 4th European PVM/MPI Users’ Group Meeting, pp. 17–24, November 1997.
M. Verma, T. Chiueh: Pupa: A low Latency Communication System for Fast Ethernet. Procc. of the Workshop on Personal Computer Based Networks of Workstations, IPPS/SPDP, 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Flores, A., García, J.M. (1998). Improving the performance of scientific parallel applications in a cluster of workstations. In: Kågström, B., Dongarra, J., Elmroth, E., Waśniewski, J. (eds) Applied Parallel Computing Large Scale Scientific and Industrial Problems. PARA 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1541. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095330
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095330
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65414-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49261-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive