Ethernet vs. InfiniBand

Have you ever tried to compare scalability of Ethernet versus InfiniBand on HPC cluster? I was shocked.

It’s a solution of three-dimensional partial differential equation using the Fast Fourier transform. Comparison isn’t absolutely fair. Because I used gcc compiler for Ethernet version and Sun compiler for InfiniBand. Hence the difference between versions on small number of CPUs. But regardess of the fact that gcc is a bit faster Ethernet shows no scalability at all! It’s unbelievable how Ethernet is slow.

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suncc with UPC NPB

When I was trying to compile NAS Parallel Benchmark for Unified Parallel C with SUN C compiler from Sun Ceres Studio IDE 9.0 Linux_i386 2009/03/06. I got dozens of errors like:

“/opt/bupc-runtime-2.10.0/opt/include/upcr_atomic.h”, line 782: warning: result of paste undefined and not portable: 32_ (E_PASTE_RESULT_NOT_TOKEN)
“/opt/bupc-runtime-2.10.0/opt/include/upcr_atomic.h”, line 782: warning: result of paste undefined and not portable: 32_fetchadd (E_PASTE_RESULT_NOT_TOKEN)

I have no idea where they come from but you can get patch from here.