Deploying Linux on IBM eServer pSeries Clusters

7.3. Gigabit Ethernet

Though with larger overhead to computing nodes and lower bandwidth for inter-node communication compared with Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), with its advantage in price, can sometimes be the choice for an HPC environment. This is especially true if applications to be run on such a system are:

• Embarrassingly Parallel. In this case, there is no communication, or very little communication, between processes. Examples are sequence searching programs in life sciences (BLAST, FASTA), low level image processing, Mandelbrot set, and Monte Carlo simulations.

• Hybrid message passing and multi-threading. In this case, one can adjust the number of processes and the number of threads to achieve a balanced computing and communication ...