Performance Evaluation of Gigabit Ethernet

1
Performance Evaluation of Gigabit Ethernet
Myrinet- 2000
2
Performance Evaluation Methodology

• Measurement Based
• 3 classes of benchmarks used
• Protocol Independent micro-benchmarks (NetPIPE)
• Message Passing Interface (MPI) micro-benchmarks
  (SKaMPI)
• Parallel applications using MPI communication
  (NAS PB)
• Each class respectively targets
• Raw latency bandwidth
• Latency bandwidth with MPI added overhead
• Overall effect on parallel applications
  performance

3
Test Setup

• 9 nodes cluster with 1 NFS node
• Dell 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon
• 3Com 3C996B Gigabit Ethernet NIC (copper)
• Cisco Catalyst 3550 12T Switch
• Myrinet 1.2 Gbps LANai9 adaptor
• Myrinet-2000 16-port crossbar switch

4
Raw Latency Bandwidth Results

• Ethernet NIC Interrupt Coalescing feature reduces
  latency by 30 ?s

• Myrinet saturates at 1100 Mbps
• Ethernet saturates at 930 Mbps (900 Mbps with IC)

5
MPI Latency Bandwidth Results

• TCP-MPI 50 ?s slower than Myrinet
• TCP-ED-MPI 65 ?s slower than Myrinet

6
NAS Parallel Benchmark Results

• Name format benchmark.data size.processors
• Runtimes normalized to Myrinet Runtimes

7
Analysis of Results

• Simple micro-benchmarks show Myrinet consistently
  enables lower latency and higher bandwidth
• MPI library using TCP-ED messaging outperform or
  match Myrinet library version on 6/15 benchmark
  configurations
• TCP-ED outperforms Myrinet by effectively
  overlapping communication and computation

8
Conclusions

• Optimized TCP/IP can outperform raw performance
  of Myrinet in some cases
• Optimized MPI libraries with OS support can
  achieve better performance than MPI over
  user-level libraries such as Myrinet GM
• Gigabit Ethernet can serve as a cost-effective
  cluster computing solution IF aggressive TCP/IP
  optimizations are implemented for cluster
  computing