ParaStation: Efficient parallel computing by clustering workstations: Design and evaluation

ParaStation is a communications fabric for connecting off-the-shelf workstations into a supercomputer. The fabric employs technology used in massively parallel machines and scales up to 4096 nodes. ParaStation's user-level message passing software preserves the low latency of the fabric by taking the operating system out of the communication path, while still providing full protection in a multiprogramming environment. The programming interface presented by ParaStation consists of a UNIX socket emulation and widely used parallel programming environments such as PVM, P4, and MPI. Implementations of ParaStation using various platforms, such as Digital's AlphaGeneration workstations and Linux PCs, achieve end-to-end (process-to-process) low latencies and a sustained bandwidth of up to 15 Mbyte/s per channel, even with small packets. Benchmarks using PVM on ParaStation demonstrate real application performance of 1 GFLOP on an 8-node cluster.