Messaging on gigabit ethernet: some experiments with GAMMA and other systems
Giuseppe Ciaccio · 2005
The Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA) is a lightweight communication system based on the Active Ports paradigm, originally designed for efficient implementation over low-cost Fast Ethernet interconnects. In this paper we report about the recently completed porting of GAMMA to the Packet Engines GNIC-II and the Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and provide a comparison among GAMMA, MPI/GAMMA, TCP/IP, and MPICH, on such high-performance commodity adapters, using different performance metrics. With a combination of low end-to-end latency (9.5 µs with GNIC-II, 32 µs with GA620) and high transmission throughput (more than 96 MByte/s with GNIC-II, more than 103 MByte/s with GA620, the latter obtained without changing the firmware of the adapter), GAMMA demonstrates the potential for Gigabit Ethernet lightweight protocols to yield messaging performance comparable to the best Myrinet protocols. This result is of interest, given the envisaged drop in cost of Gigabit Ethernet due to the forthcoming transition from fiber optic to UTP cabling and ever increasing mass market production of such standard interconnect. We also reposts about a technique for message fragmentation that is commonly exploited to increase the throughput with short message. When a different, though more widely used, performance metrics is considered, such a technique results into a performance loss rather than improvement.