Coupling PC based commodity technology with distributed computing methodologies provides on important advance in the development of single user dedicated systems. Beowulf is a class of experimental parallel workstations developed to evaluate and characterize the design space of this new operating point in price performance. A key factor determining the realizable performance under real world workloads is the means devised for interprocessor communications. A study has been performed to characterize a family of interconnect topologies feasible with low cost mass market network technologies. Behavior sensitivities to packet size and traffic density are determined. Findings are presented which compare more complex segmented topologies to the earlier parallel "channel bonded" scheme. It is shown that in many circumstances the more complex topologies perform better, and in some circumstances software routing techniques compare favorably to more expensive hardware switch mechanisms.

The Convex SPP-1000, the most recent SPC, is distinguished by a true global shared memory capability based on the first commercial version of directory based cache coherence mechanisms and SCI protocol. The system was evaluated at NASA/GSFC in the Beta-test environment using three classes of operational experiments targeting earth and space science applications. A multiple program workload tested job-stream level parallelism. Synthetic programs measured overhead costs of barrier, fork-join, and message passing synchronization primitives. An efficient tree-code version of an N-body simulation revealed scaling properties and measured the overall efficiency. This paper presents the results of this study and provides the earliest published evaluation of this new scalable architecture.>

The Beowulf parallel workstation combines 16 PC-compatible processing subsystems and disk drives using dual Ethernet networks to provide a single-user environment with 1 Gops peak performance, half a Gbyte of disk storage, and up to 8 times the disk I/O bandwidth of conventional workstations. The Beowulf architecture establishes a new operating point in price-performance for single-user environments requiring high disk capacity and bandwidth. The Beowulf research project is investigating the feasibility of exploiting mass market commodity computing elements in support of Earth and space science requirements for large data-set browsing and visualization, simulation of natural physical processes, and assimilation of remote sensing data. This paper reports the findings from a series of experiments for characterizing the Beowulf dual channel communication over-head. It is shown that dual networks can sustain 70% greater throughput than a single network alone but that bandwidth achieved is more highly sensitive to message size than to the number of messages at peak demand. While overhead is shown to be high for global synchronization, its overall impact on scalability of real world applications for computational fluid dynamics and N-body gravitational simulation is shown to be modest.

The Convex SPP-1000 is the first commercial implementation of a new generation of scalable shared memory parallel computers with full cache coherence. It employs a hierarchical structure of processing communication and memory name-space management resources to provide a scalable NUMA environment. Ensembles of 8 HPPA-RISC7100 microprocessorsemploy an internal cross-bar switch and directory based cache coherence scheme to provide a tightly coupled SMP.Up to 16 processing ensembles are interconnected by a 4 ring network incorporating a full hardware implementation of the SCI protocol for a full system configuration of 128 processors. This paper presents the findings of a set of empirical studies using both synthetic test codes and full applications for the Earth and space sciences to characterize the performance properties of this new architecture. It is shown that overhead and latencies of global primitive mechanisms, while low in absolute time, are significantly more costl...