A comparison of 4X InfiniBand and Quadrics Elan-4 technologies

Quadrics Elan-4 and 4X InfiniBand have comparable performance in terms of peak bandwidth and ping-pong latency. In contrast, the two network architectures differ dramatically in details ranging from signaling technologies to programming interface design to software stacks. Both networks compete in the high performance computing marketplace, and InfiniBand is currently receiving a significant amount of attention, due mostly to its potential cost/performance advantage. This work compares 4X InfiniBand and Quadrics Elan-4 on identical compute hardware using application benchmarks of importance to the DOE community. We use scaling efficiency as the main performance metric, and we also provide a cost analysis for different network configurations. Although our 32-node test platform is relatively small, some scaling issues are evident. In general, the Quadrics hardware scales slightly better on most of the applications tested.