Publications

Scalability and Performance of a Large Linux Cluster

Brightwell, Ronald B.; Plimpton, Steven J.

In this paper the authors present performance results from several parallel benchmarks and applications on a 400-node Linux cluster at Sandia National Laboratories. They compare the results on the Linux cluster to performance obtained on a traditional distributed-memory massively parallel processing machine, the Intel TeraFLOPS. They discuss the characteristics of these machines that influence the performance results and identify the key components of the system software that they feel are important to allow for scalability of commodity-based PC clusters to hundreds and possibly thousands of processors.