The Parapc / Parastation Project: Eecient Parallel Computing by Clustering Workstations

ParaStation is a communications fabric for connecting oo-the-shelf workstations into a supercomputer. The fabric employs technology used in massively parallel machines and scales up to 4096 nodes. The message passing software preserves the low latency of the fabric by taking the operating system out of the communication path, while still providing full protection. The rst implementation of ParaStation using Digital's AlphaGeneration workstations achieves end-to-end (process-to-process) latencies as low as 2:5s and a sustained bandwidth of more than 10 MByte/s per channel with small packets. Benchmarks using PVM on ParaStation demonstrate real application performance of 1 GFLOP on an 8-node cluster.