Maestro2: high speed network technology for high performance computing

Cluster computers have become the de facto mechanism to build high performance computing environments. To fully exploit the computing power of these environments, one must utilize high performance network and protocol technologies, since the communication patterns of parallel applications running on clusters require low latency and high throughput, not achievable by using off-the-shell network technologies. We have developed a technology to build high performance network equipment, called Maestro2. This paper describes the novel techniques used by Maestro2 to extract maximum performance from the physical medium and studies the impact of overhead in communication software. The results obtained clearly show that Maestro2 is a promising technology, presenting very good results both in terms of latency and throughput. The results also show the large impact of software overhead in the overall performance of the system and validate the need for optimized communication libraries for high performance computing.