Impact of level 2 cache and memory subsystem on the scalability of clusters of small-scale SMP servers

This paper presents a performance study of two commodity clusters built from two models of Dell PowerEdge servers. Both clusters have eight servers interconnected by GigaNet for fast message passing and by Fast Ethernet for Network File System (NFS) traffic. The two server models are different in pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing. CLUSTER 2000 pp. 45 - 51
Main Authors Jenwei Hsieh, Tau Leng, Mashayekhi, V., Rooholamini, R.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 2000
Subjects
Computer applications
Ethernet networks
File servers
File systems
Message passing
Network servers
Power system interconnection
Power system modeling
Scalability
Telecommunication traffic
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Summary:This paper presents a performance study of two commodity clusters built from two models of Dell PowerEdge servers. Both clusters have eight servers interconnected by GigaNet for fast message passing and by Fast Ethernet for Network File System (NFS) traffic. The two server models are different in processors, level 2 (L2) cache, speed of front-side bus (FSB), chipsets and memory subsystem. They represent generic servers from two generations of Intel-based architecture. In this study, we use well-known benchmark programs to understand how they perform for computation-intensive applications. We first study their performance in stand-alone environment to unveil the performance characteristic of a compute node. We further explore their aggregated performance when they are used in a cluster environment. We are particularly interested in their scalability, per-processor performance degradation due to memory contention and inter-process communications and the correlation between results from different benchmark programs. We found that L2 cache and memory subsystem have significant impact on computation-intensive parallel applications such as the NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) programs. For configurations with a large number of processors (or multiple processors per compute node), some of NPB programs perform better on platform with larger global L2 cache, even though the platform has slower processors, FSB and memory components.
ISBN:9780769508962
0769508960
DOI:10.1109/CLUSTR.2000.888991