3rd International Conference
on SCI-based Technology and Research
Comparing MPI performance of SCI and VIA
Friedrich Seifert, Daniel Balkanski, Wolfgang Rehm (Technische Universität Chemnitz)
Technical Session 1: Message Passing Programming
SCI-Europe 2000, München, Germany (conference stream of Euro-Par 2000)
, August 2000
Abstract:
Both the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) and the Virtual Interface
Architecture (VIA) aim at providing effective cluster
communication. While the former is a standardized subnet technology
the latter is a generic architecture which can be applied to a variety
of physical medias. Both approaches provide user level communication,
but they achieve it on different ways and thus, have different
characteristics that are independent of the actual implementation. In
this paper we report and compare the raw network speed of an SCI and a
VIA implementation as delivered by MPI and show how it affects
application performance by means of the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite.