Performance Evaluation of Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet for System-Area-Networks

Low latency and high bandwidth networking is essential for cluster computing and System-Area-Networks (SAN). The performance of a SAN optimized interconnect, Myrinet, is compared with gigabit Ethernet running TCP/IP. Though Myrinet has lower latencies and higher throughput than gigabit Ethernet, it is found that an efficient implementation of message passing interface library over TCP/IP achieves performance very close to Myrinet. These observations leads to the fact that gigabit and the upcoming 10 gigabit Ethernet can serve as a cost-effective alternative to specialized interconnects if the efficiency of protocol implementations can be improved. This paper also surveys some recent work being done on increasing the efficiency of TCP/IP and other efficient protocol implementations that benefit all applications using the ubiquitous sockets interface over Ethernet without using specialized libraries such as GM over Myrinet.