A Portable Method for Improving Available Bandwidth of PC Cluster
Takafumi Fukunaga · Journal of Information Processing · 2014
The Installation and maintenance costs of dedicated interconnection networks for PC cluster are still expensive, and they tend to increase the specializations and complexities in comparison with Ethernet due to dedicated protocols and libraries to draw their hardware performance. The porting works from Ethernet system to dedicated system need lots of time and manpower. This paper proposes a simple and portable method, PMCME, that improves the PC cluster performance only by loading the proposed module. The existing systems can easily and cheaply introduce PMCME. The basic idea is that the performance of PC clusters increases by improving the total bandwidth of the streams running concurrently on each node even if the bandwidth of each stream does not increase. PMCME performs better than IEEE802.3ad (LACP) without the LACP supported switches. LACP performance is influenced by the network parameters such as IP addresses and MAC addresses because it uses them as hash keys for distribution policy. On the contrary, PMCME shows the stable performance regardless of them.