COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE OF LAM/MPI AND MPICH ON A LINUX CLUSTER

Abstract

High performance parallel computers provide computational rates necessary for computer simulations and intensive computing applications. An important part of a parallel computer program is an MPI software library, which implements communication within parallel applications. Several MPI implementations exist, most widely used among them are LAM/MPI and MPICH. This paper presents results of four basic synthetic tests and two real simulations in LAM/MPI and MPICH environments. Tests were made on a computer cluster composed of 17 dual-processor nodes connected by a toroidal mesh. Results show that on the investigated cluster, LAM outperformed MPICH especially by bidirectional ring communication, and that appropriate trimming of communication parameters significantly contributes to the final parallel performance.