Interconnect performance evaluation of SGI Altix 3700 BX2, Cray XI, Cray Opteron Cluster, and Dell PowerEdge

We study the performance of inter-process communication on four high-speed multiprocessor systems using a set of communication benchmarks. The goal is to identify certain limiting factors and bottlenecks with the interconnect of these systems as well as to compare these interconnects. We measured network bandwidth using different numbers of communicating processors and communication patterns - such as point-to-point communication, collective communication, and dense communication patterns. The four platforms are: a 512-processor SGIAltix 3700 BX2 shared-memory machine with 3.2 GB/s links; a 64-processor (single-streaming) Cray XI shared-memory machine with 32 1.6 GB/s links; a 128-processor Cray Opteron cluster using a Myrinet network; and a 1280-node Dell PowerEdge cluster with an InfiniBand network. Our results show the impact of the network bandwidth and topology on the overall performance of each interconnect