BIP-SMP: high performance message passing over a cluster of commodity SMPs
SC '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Multi-protocol active messages on a cluster of SMP's
SC '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
A Framework for Building Distributed Data Flow Chains in Clusters
PARA '02 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Applied Parallel Computing Advanced Scientific Computing
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Though several System Area Networks (SAN) are available to enhance the communication performance of a cluster, none of them has taken yet into account the special needs of clusters built out of SMP machines. Since single-CPU computers will be more and more replaced by small-scale SMP systems in the near future, an appropriate cluster interconnect should be adopted to the needs of multi-CPU nodes. In this paper, we investigate the properties of the ATOLL SAN, which offers with its four replicated network interfaces (NI), the integrated 8x8 switch and its four links the possibility to boost the total communication performance and message throughput inside a SMP node. As the chip design is in its final stage at the time of writing, we use detailed simulations of all hard- and software components to precisely predict the performance of the ATOLL SAN and show that ATOLL is capable of serving efficiently several message transfers at a time while eliminating the need to multiplex the network interface in software.