MPI performance on Coral

[Josip Loncaric]

I have assembled the MPI performance results obtained on our cluster
'Coral' here:

http://www.icase.edu/~josip/MPIonCoral.html

We tested MPI/Pro, MPICH+MVICH and LAM over Fast Ethernet (TCP), local
(loopback or shared memory) and Giganet cLAN (VIA) transports.  All of
the tested MPI libraries reach high bandwidth; the differences are
primarily in latency and in CPU cycles remaining to the application on
dual CPU nodes.

While collective communication tests with MVICH have not been completed
yet, I hope to add them shortly.  The rest of our data is already on
line: our best result was 12 microsecond MPI latency and 107.2 Mbyte/s
bandwidth using MVICH over Giganet cLAN.

Sincerely,
Josip

P.S. Earlier, we also tested Gigabit Ethernet using 3com/Alteon/NetGear
cards, but found that reasonably high performance could only be reached
under very contrived circumstances.  Fast Ethernet bonding should do
about as well at a much lower cost.  At a somewhat higher cost, Giganet
or Myrinet should perform much better.

-- 
Dr. Josip Loncaric, Senior Staff Scientist        mailto:josip at icase.edu
ICASE, Mail Stop 132C           PGP key at http://www.icase.edu./~josip/
NASA Langley Research Center             mailto:j.loncaric at larc.nasa.gov
Hampton, VA 23681-2199, USA    Tel. +1 757 864-2192  Fax +1 757 864-6134