The design and evaluation of high performance communication using a Gigabit Ethernet
Shinji Sumimoto, Hiroshi Tezuka, Atsushi Hori, Hiroshi Harada, Toshiyuki Takahashi, Yutaka Ishikawa · 1999
A high performance communication facility, called the GigaE PM, has been designed and implemented for parallel applications on clusters of computers using a Gigabit Ethernet. The GigaE PM provides not only a reliable high bandwidth and low latency communication function, but also supports existing network protocols such as TCP/IP. In the design of the GigaE PM, it is assumed that the Gigabit Ethernet card used has a dedicated processor and its program can be modied. A reliable communication mechanism for a parallel application is implemented on the rmware while existing network protocols are handled by an operating system kernel. A prototype system has been implemented using an Essential Communications Gigabit Ethernet card. The performance results show that a 48.3 s round trip time for a four byte user message, and 56.7 MBytes/sec bandwidth for a 1,468 byte message have been achieved on Intel Pentium II 400 MHz PCs. We have implemented MPICH-PM on top of the GigaE PM, and evaluat...