Efficient Shared Memory Message Passing for Inter-VM Communications
Euro-Par 2008 Workshops - Parallel Processing
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This poster describes initial performance results comparing a tuned lightweight Linux environment to the standard Catamount lightweight kernel environment on compute nodes of the Cray XT3 system. We have created a lightweight Linux environment that consumes less memory and outperforms Catamount for the selfish micro-benchmark that measures operating system interference. In spite of this, Catamount significantly outperforms our lightweight Linux environment for all network performance micro-benchmarks. Latency and bandwidth performance are more than 20% worse for Linux and 16-byte allreduce performance is 2.5 times worse, even at small numbers of nodes. These results indicate that even a properly configured and tuned Linux environment can still suffer from performance and scalability issues on a highly balanced platform like the XT3. This poster provides a detailed description of our lightweight Linux environment, shows relevant performance results, and describes the important issues that allow Catamount to achieve superior performance.