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ALS 2000 Abstract
KLAT2's Flat Neighborhood Network
H. G. Dietz, T. I. Mattox, University of Kentucky
Abstract
KLAT2, Kentucky Linux Athlon Testbed 2, is a cluster of 64 (plus
two ``hot spare'') 700MHz AMD Athlon PCs. The raw compute speed
of the processors justifies calling the system a supercomputer,
but these fast nodes must be mated with a high-performance
network in order to achieve the balance needed to obtain
speed-up on real applications. Usually, cluster networks are
built by combining the fastest available NICs and switching
fabric, making the network expensive. Instead, KLAT2 uses a
novel ``Flat Neighborhood'' network topology that was designed
by a genetic algorithm (GA). A total of about $8,100 worth of
100Mb/s Fast Ethernet NICs, switches, and Cat5 cable, allows
KLAT2's network to deliver both single-switch latency for any
point-to-point communication and up to 25.6Gb/s bisection
bandwidth. This paper describes how this new network
architecture was derived, how it is used, and how it performs.
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