KLAT2's flat neighborhood network
Hank G. Dietz, Timothy I. Mattox · 2000
KLAT2, KentuckyLinux Athlon Testbed 2, is a cluster of 64 (plus two"hot spare") 700MHz AMD Athlon PCs. The rawcompute speed of the processors justifies calling the system a supercomputer,but these fast nodes must be mated with a high-performance network in order to achieve the balance needed to obtain speed-up on real applications. Usually,cluster networks are built by combining the fastest available NICs and switching fabric, making the network expensive.Instead, KLAT2 uses a novel"Flat Neighborhood"network topology that was designed by a genetic algorithm (GA). Atotal of about $8,100 worth of 100Mb/s Fast Ethernet NICs, switches, and Cat5 cable, allows KLAT2'snetwork to deliverboth single-switch latencyfor anypoint-to-point communication and up to 25.6Gb/s bisection bandwidth. This paper describes howthis newnetwork architecture was derived, howitis used, and howitperforms.