MegaProto/E: power-aware high-performance cluster with commodity technology
Taisuke Boku, Mitsuhisa Sato, Daisuke Takahashi, Hiroshi Nakashima, Hiroshi Nakamura, Satoshi Matsuoka, Yoshihiko Hotta · 2006
we have been developing a prototype cluster by using not ASIC or FPGA but only commodity technology. Its packaging is extremely compact and dense, and its performance/power ratio is very high. Our previous prototype system named “MegaProto ” demonstrated that one cluster unit which consists of 16 commodity low-power processors can be successfully implemented on just 1U height chassis and it achieves up to 2.8 times higher performance/power ratio than ordinary high-performance dual-Xeon 1U server unit. We have improved MegaProto by replacing the CPU and enhancing the I/O performance. The new cluster unit named “MegaProto/E ” with 16 of Transmeta Efficeon processors achieves 32GFlops of peak performance which is 2.2-fold of the original one. The cluster unit is equipped with independent dual network of Gigabit Ethernet including dual 24-port switches. The maximum power consumption of the cluster unit is kept to 320W which is comparable with today’s high-end PC server for high performance clusters. Performance evaluation using NPB kernels and HPL shows that the performance of MegaProto/E exceeds that of dual-Xeon server in all the benchmarks, and its performance ratio ranges from 1.3 to 3.69. These results reveal that our solution of implementing a number of ultra lowpower processors in compact packaging is an excellent way to achieve extremely high performance on applications with certain degree of parallelism. We are now building a multiunit cluster with 128 CPUs (8 units) to prove that this advantage still holds with higher scalability. 1.