Multicast Performance Analysis for High-Speed Torus Networks

Overall efficiency of high-performance computingclusters not only relies on the computing power of theindividual nodes, but also on the performance that theunderlying network can provide to the computationalapplication. Although modern high-performancenetworks, especially System Area Networks (SANs), havehigh unicast performance, they do not support multicastcommunication in hardware. This researchexperimentally evaluates the performance of variousprotocols for unicast-based and path-based multicastcommunication on high-speed torus networks. Software-based multicast performance results of selectedalgorithms on a 16-node Scalable Coherent Interface(SCI) torus are given. The strengths and weaknesses ofthe various protocols are illustrated in terms of startupand completion latency, CPU utilization, and linkutilization and concurrency.