COMPaS: A Pentium Pro PC-based SMP Cluster and Its Experience

We have built an eight node SMP cluster called COMPaS (Cluster Of Multi-Processor Systems), each node of which is a quadprocessor Pentium Pro PC. We have designed and implemented a remote memory based user-level communication layer which provides lowoverhead and high bandwidth using Myrinet. We designed a hybrid programming model in order to take advantage of locality in each SMP node. Intra-node computations utilize a multi-threaded programming style (Solaris threads) and inter-node programming is based on message passing and remote memory operations. In this paper we report on this hybrid shared memory/distributed memory programming on COMPaS and its preliminary evaluation. The performance of COMPaS is aected by data size and access patterns, and the proportion of inter-node communication. If the data size is small enough to all t on the cache, parallel

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Yoshio Tanaka, Motohiko Matsuda, Makoto Ando, Kazuto Kubota, Mitsuhisa Sato
• Keywords: Cluster Called Compas, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Hybrid Programming Model, IPPS 1998, Remote Memory