Performance of the NAS Parallel Benchmarks on PVM-Based Networks

✍ Scribed by S. White; A. Alund; V.S. Sunderam

• Book ID: 102974702
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 950 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.1995.1048

✦ Synopsis

The NAS parallel benchmarks are a set of applications that embody the key characteristics of typical processing in computational aerodynamics. Five of these, the kernel benchmarks, have been implemented on the PVM system, a software system for network-based concurrent computing, with a view to determining the efficacy of networked environments for high-performance computational aerodynamics applications. We present results of porting and executing the NPB kernels in three different cluster environments using low- to medium-powered workstations on Ethernet and two types of FDDI networks. Our results indicate that mediocre to good performance could be obtained despite the communications-intensive nature of the applications. In most cases, we were able to achieve performance levels within an order of magnitude of a Cray Y/MP- 1 on eight-workstation clusters via optimizations to the PVM infrastructure alone, i.e., with little or no algorithmic modifications. However, our results also indicate that further improvements are possible and that network-based computing has the potential to be a viable technology for highperformance scientific computing. O 1995 Academic Press, Inc.