Impact of topology and link aggregation on a PC cluster with Ethernet

Abstract—In addition to its use in local area networks, Ethernet has been used for connecting hosts in the area of highperformance computing. Here, we investigated the impact of topology and link aggregation on a large-scale PC cluster with Ethernet. Ethernet topology that allows loops and its routing can be implemented by the VLAN routing method without creating broadcast storms. To simplify the system configuration without modifying system software, the VLAN tag is added to a frame at switches in our implementation of topologies. Each host creates VLAN interfaces that have different local network addresses on a physical interface, so that a switch learns the MAC addresses of hosts in a PC cluster by broadcast. Evaluation results showed that the performance characteristics of an eightswitch network are comparable to those of an ideal 1-switch (full crossbar) network in the execution of High-Performance LINPACK Benchmark (HPL) on a 225-host PC cluster. On the other hand, evaluation ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Takafumi Watanabe, Masahiro Nakao, Tomoyuki Hiroyasu, Tomohiro Otsuka, Michihiro Koibuchi
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2008, Cluster Computing, Link Aggregation, PC Cluster, VLAN