THPTB: A SMP-based PC Cluster with Channel Bonding for High-Performance Computing

Abstract

To use supercomputer for high-performance computing has been growing. Supercomputers that are single big expensive machines with a shared memory and one or more processors meet the professional need. A large-scale processing and storage system that provides high bandwidth at low cost is then their expectation. A cluster is a collection of independent and cheap machines, used together as a supercomputer to provide a solution. In this paper, a SMP-based PC cluster (36 processors), called THPTB (TungHai Parallel TestBed) with channel bonded technique, was proposed and built. The system architecture and benchmark performances of the cluster are also presented in this paper. To take advantage of the parallelism of the SMPs cluster systems, the PVM or MPI library has been used to code a message-passing program on our SMPs cluster. To measure the computing performance, the matrix multiplication program with the different sizes has been performed and parallel ray-tracing program PVMPOV has been used to demonstrate the performance in the SMP cluster by using PVM. The HPL benchmark is also used to demonstrate the performance of our testbed by using LAM/MPI. The experimental results show that our cluster can obtain 17.38 Gflop/s with channel bonding, when the total number of processor used is 36.