Performance characteristics of a cost-effective medium-sized Beowulf cluster supercomputer

Abstract

This paper presents some performance results obtained from a new Beowulf cluster, the Helix, built at Massey University, Auckland funded by the Allan Wilson Center for Evolutionary Ecology. Issues concerning network latency and the effect of the switching fabric and network topology on performance are discussed. In order to assess how the system performed using the message passing interface (MPI), two test suites (mpptest and jumpshot) were used to provide a comprehensive network performance analysis. The performance of an older fast-ethernet/single processor based cluster is compared to the new Gigabit/SMP cluster. The Linpack performance of Helix is investigated. The Linpack Rmax rating of 234.8 Gflops puts the cluster at third place in the Australia/ New Zealand sublist of the Top500 supercomputers, an extremely good performance considering the commodity parts and its low cost (US$125000).