RWC PC Cluster II and SCore Cluster System Software-High Performance Linux Cluster
Yutaka Ishikawa · 1999
The RWC PC Cluster II, consisting of 128 Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors connected by a Myricom Myrinet giga-bit network, achieves the comparable speed of a super computer such as Cray T3E. Its system software called the SCore cluster system software is built on top of Linux without any kernel modifications but adding a driver to the kernel. The SCore Cluster system software consists of the user-level communication facility called PM using a Myricom Myrinet giga-bit network, a communication library MPI on top of PM, a parallel programming language system called MPC++, and a global operating system called SCore-D. This paper shows that a compact and well maintainable PC cluster using Linux can be built and its performance is the comparable super computer power. The key technology to realize high performance communication is introduced, i.e., so-called zero copy message transfer between nodes and one copy message transfer within a node realized in the PM kernel-level driver. 1 Introd...