Scalability and Performance of Two Large Linux Clusters

R. Brightwell and S. J. Plimpton, J of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 61, 1546-1569 (2001).

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

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