A PC cluster system employing I II 1394

• Published in: Concurrency and computation 2004-08, Vol.16 (10), p.989-1003
• Main Authors: Hyoudou, Kazuki, Ozaki, Ryota, Nakayama, Yasuichi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1532-0626; 1532-0634
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.792

In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of a PC cluster system in which I II 1394 is applied. Networks for parallel cluster computing require low latency and high bandwidth. It is also important that the networks be commercially available at low cost. Few network devices satisfy all of the above requirements. However, the I II 1394 standard provides a good compromise for fulfilling these requirements. We have used I II 1394 devices, which support a 400 Mbps data transfer rate, to connect the nodes of a PC cluster system which we have designed and implemented. We have implemented two communication libraries. One is a fast communication library called CF for I II 1394. The other is a MPI layer library on the CF library. Experimental results show that CF achieves a 17.2 microsecond round-trip time. On application benchmarks, the system was considerably faster than TCP/IP over Fast Ethernet. Even though the system was constructed at very low cost, it provides good performance. Using the I II 1394 standard is thus a good solution for low-cost cluster systems.