Performance evaluation of the Sun Fire Link SMP clusters

As symmetric multiprocessors become commonplace, the interconnection networks and the communication system software in clusters of multiprocessors become critical to achieving high performance. Recently, Sun Microsystems has introduced a new system area network, Sun Fire Link interconnect, for its Sun Fire cluster systems. Sun Fire Link is a memory-based interconnect, where Sun MPI uses the Remote Shared Memory (RSM) model for its user-level internode messaging protocol. In this paper, we present the overall architecture of the Sun Fire Link interconnect, explain how communication is done under the RSM, and describe the Sun MPI implementation. We provide an in-depth performance evaluation of the Sun Fire Link interconnect cluster of four Sun Fire 6800s at the RSM layer, MPI microbenchmark layer, and the application layer. Our results include the performance of the Remote Shared Memory API primitives, MPI overhead on top of the RSM, latency and bandwidth under different communication mo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: IJHPCN
• Authors: Ying Qian, Ahmad Afsahi, Nathan R. Fredrickson, Reza Zamani
• Keywords: IJHPCN 2006, Sun Fire, Sun Fire Link, Sun MPI