Commodity clusters: performance comparison between PCs and workstations

DAISy (Distributed Array of Inexpensive Systems) is a 16 node PC cluster running a full Unix compatible operating system. The network media used includes standard 10 Mb/s (10BASE-2) Ethernet (used for client node NFS mounts and any client node interactive work users find necessary), and, switched 100 Mbs/(100BASE-TX) Fast Ethernet (used for user program message passing traffic). The DAISy cluster is used to investigate the viability of commodity PC technology to perform computation of scientific and engineering problems traditionally performed on "supercomputers", and more recently high performance RISC workstations and clusters of RISC workstations. Performance analysis of the various single node subsystems were carried out along with performance analysis of the cluster as a whole on a number of parallel applications. The results show that the current Pentium 90 MHz CPU and motherboards used are well within that of many low end workstations offered by traditional workstation vendors.