Pipelined Broadcast on Ethernet Switched Clusters.” The
Pitch Patarasuk, Ahmad Faraj, Xin Hui Yuan · 2006
We consider unicast-based pipelined broadcast schemes for clusters connected by multiple Ethernet switches. By splitting a large broadcast message into segments and broadcasting the segments in a pipelined fashion, pipelined broadcast may achieve very high performance. We develop algorithms for computing various contention-free broadcast trees on Ethernet switched clusters that are suitable for pipelined broad-cast, and evaluate the schemes through experimen-tation. The conclusions drawn from our theoretical and experimental study include the following. First, pipelined broadcast can be more effective than other common broadcast schemes including the ones used in the latest versions of MPICH and LAM/MPI when the message size is sufficiently large. Second, contention-free broadcast trees are essential for pipelined broadcast to achieve high performance. Finally, while it is dif-ficult to determine the optimal message segment size for pipelined broadcast, finding one size that gives good performance is relatively easy.