Design and implementation of a high speed interconnection network for ANUPAM

Abstract

The basic hardware and software features of the ANUPAM system have been described in this chapter. Communication within and outside the clusters in ANUPAM are also described. The communication bandwidth within an ANUPAM cluster is around 2 Mbytes/sec. There are several software overheads with the UNIX communication drivers, which have restricted the communication performance of the system. These overheads affect the speedup of communication-intensive programs substantially. For example, the UNPACK benchmark program (1000 × 1000 matrix size, double precision) for one CPU in ANUPAM gives around 7 Mflops whereas it yields just 18 Mflops with 8 processors. In the following chapters, software and hardware modifications for improving the system communication performance are suggested.