MAESTRO2: EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT TECHNIQUES IN THE LINK LAYER
Shinichi Yamagiwa, Leonel A. Sousa, KEVIN FERREIRA, Keiichi Aoki, Masaaki Ono, Koichi Wada · Journal of Interconnection Networks · 2006
Cluster computers became the vehicle of choice to build high performance computing environments. To fully exploit the computing power of these environments, technologies for high performance networks and protocols have to be applied, since the communication patterns of parallel applications running on clusters demand low latency and high throughput. Our previous work identifies the main drawbacks of conventional network technologies, and proposed some techniques to solve them within a new network solution called Maestro. This paper describes not only the architecture and the evaluation platform of the Maestro2, but also the technologies introduced for enhancing the performance of the original Maestro framework. Novel techniques are proposed at the link layer and at the switching level, and its design and implementation in the Maestro2 is discussed: continuous network burst and out-of-order switching. Moreover, a specialized communication library has been developed to take full advantage of these new techniques for implementing high speed cluster networks based on the Maestro2 environment. Experimental results clearly show that the new proposed techniques provide significant improvements, both in terms of latency and throughput, which are essential to efficient cluster computing.