Benchmarking a network of PCs running parallel applications

Presents a benchmarking study that compares the performance of a network of four PCs connected by a 100 Mbit/s fast Ethernet running three different system software configurations: TCP/IP on Windows NT, TCP/IP on Linux and a lightweight message-passing protocol (U-Net active messages) on Linux. For each configuration, we report results for communication micro-benchmarks and the NAS (Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation) parallel benchmarks. For the NAS benchmarks, the overall running time using Linux TCP/IP was 12-500% less than the Windows NT TCP/IP configuration. Likewise, the Linux U-Net based message-passing protocol outperformed the Linux TCP/IP version by 5-200%+. We also show that, by using Linux U-Net, we are able to achieve 125 μs latency between two processes using PVM. Finally, we report that the default mathematical libraries supplied with NT (for both gcc and Visual C++) are substantially slower than the one supplied with Linux